How To Establish Sewer Cleaning Zones

Using Select And Modify to establish sewer cleaning zones.

Video Transcript

In this video, we are going to talk about the Select and Modify tool. This tool allows you to visually draw a box on the screen to select several features and then perform an action on all of them at once. Your selected features can then be deleted move to another layer. Export it to Excel or in the example scenario we are going to do here, you can set a field value for all features in the batch. I have a map here with a sewer network. Let's say I want to create a three-year sewer inspection plan where I inspect and clean one third of my sewer lines each year. You can see here that I’ve already created a field in my sewer layer for recording the inspection year. For instructions on how to add fields like this, see video 215. Now, you could enter the actual year here, but I have chosen to enter year one year two and year three because I plan to repeat this three year process indefinitely. It would take forever for me to go in and manually label each of these fields. This is where the Select and Modify tool comes in to use. I first go to the menu and select the Select and Modify tool. Then, select the layer you want to work on. In this instance, we're going to be using the sewer gravity mains layer. I want to select everything on the north side of town between here and here, so I click the rectangle selection button and draw a rectangle that selects as many as I can without selecting the ones I don't want to. It says we have 224 features selected so far. That's not quite as many as I want, so I’m going to click Select. I can draw another rectangle and select More. That looks better. Once I have just the right line selected, you click on your action menu here. Here you can see all the actions I could take on these selected features. In our case, we want to use the set field value so that I can assign year one to all of these lines. First, I’m going to export to CSV file so that I can see the total length of all these selected lines. I can see here that the total length of the selected areas is 72 631 feet. That's pretty close to being a third of my total length for the whole town, so I’m happy with my selection. Back in the Select and Modify tool and going to select. Then, I want to set field value. Pick the inspection year field, scroll down to the bottom, and click ok. Then we want to select our new field value. I’m going to type year one. Apply notifies me the 261 features have been modified. To confirm that this has worked, I can click on one of my sewer lines and see that it has that value. Let me fast forward while I repeat these steps for the remaining parts of town. Now that I’m done, let's finish up by color coding our lines according to this inspection here. To do this, you go to your list of layers, select that layer settings, classify based on inspection year, scroll down, click ok, and now see our sewer lines are colored based on the year that they need to be inspected. That's how you use the select and modify tool.