ERROR

Cannot create a dirty area outside the topology's spatial domain

Last Published: April 25, 2020

Error Message

"Cannot create a dirty area outside the topology's spatial domain.
The coordinates or measures are out of bounds."Depending on the action that lead to the error, one of the following phrases may prepend the error message:"The feature's geometry could not be modified.""The Create Feature task could not be completed."

Cause

When Dirty Areas are created, the envelope of the dirty area is expanded slightly, as outlined in article 24664;
<a href='http://support.esri.com/en/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/24664' target='_blank'>FAQ: When I zoom into a large scale, why is the Dirty Area larger than the extent of the feature?</a>. The current edit is creating a Dirty Area that exceeds the spatial domain of the dataset. This is caused by the data being very close to or at the extent of the spatial domain.

Solution or Workaround

There are several solutions to this issue.

The first involves changing the properties of the Topology.

The second involves reloading the data into a feature dataset with a different spatial extent and precision.

  1. If the cluster tolerance of the Topology is larger than the default value suggested in the Build Topology wizard, setting the tolerance to a smaller value or to the default cluster tolerance, may resolve the issue, as the expansion of the Dirty Area is directly related to the cluster tolerance.
  2. There may be a valid cluster tolerance, but attempting to make an edit that is near or at the spatial domain extent of the feature dataset. If this is the case, the spatial domain extent of the data must be expanded.

    Once the spatial domain of a feature dataset is established, it cannot be changed. A new feature dataset with a sufficiently large spatial domain extent must be created and the existing data must be reloaded into it.

Article ID:000006000

Software:
  • ArcMap

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