Editing is the process of making changes to features in a feature layer. This includes adding, updating, and deleting features. In a traditional database sense, this is the same as Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations. Retrieving has already been discussed when we learned about finding and searching data in Chapter 7, Finding, Querying and Identifying Features, so here we will focus on Create, Update, and Delete.
When we talk about editing data, we are not only talking about creating, updating, and deleting the field values, but we are also talking about creating, updating, and deleting geometry. As we noted earlier, a feature has both attributes and geometry. You can't create a feature or graphic without geometry and expect it to show up on the map. However, you can create a feature or graphic with just geometry and no attributes. As we saw in Chapter 5, Geometry and Symbology, the feature or graphic must also have symbology in order for...