An overview of the Feature Class toolset

The Feature Class toolset provides a set of tools designed to perform basic feature class management including creating, appending, integrating, and updating multiple feature classes.

A feature class is a collection of features with the same type of geometry: point, line, polygon, or annotation.

Annotation in the geodatabase is stored in annotation feature classes. Each annotation feature that is text has symbology, including font, size, and color, and many other text symbol properties.

A feature class may be stored with other feature classes in a feature dataset in a geodatabase or as a stand-alone feature class in a geodatabase. A feature class can also be stored in a shapefile or with other feature classes of a different geometry in a coverage.

Tool	Description
Append Annotation Feature Classes	Creates a new geodatabase annotation feature class or appends to an existing annotation feature class by combining annotation from multiple input geodatabase annotation feature classes into a single feature class with annotation classes.
Calculate Default Spatial Grid Index	Calculates a set of valid grid index values (spatial grid 1, 2, and 3) for the input features. Grid index values will be calculated even if the input features do not support spatial grid indexing.
Calculate Default XY Tolerance	Calculates a default XY tolerance by examining the spatial reference and the extent of the feature class.
Create Feature Class	Creates an empty feature class in an ArcSDE, file geodatabase, or personal geodatabase; in a folder it creates a shapefile.
Create Fishnet	Creates a fishnet of rectangular cells. The output can be polyline or polygon features.
Create Random Points	Creates a specified number of random point features. Random points can be generated in an extent window, inside polygon features, on point features, or along line features.
Integrate	Integrate is used to maintain the integrity of shared feature boundaries by making features coincident if they fall within the specified x,y tolerance. Features that fall within the specified x,y tolerance are considered identical or coincident.
Update Annotation Feature Class	Updates the input annotation feature class with text attribute fields and optionally populates the value of each new field for every feature in the feature class.

Tools in the Feature Class toolset