How to edit a 2D shapefile

To edit an existing shapefile, follow the following procedure:

1. Load the shapefile

   Load an existing GIS file into the Flood Modeller viewport. This can be a point, polyline, or polygon shapefile (.shp).

2. Enable Shapefile Editing Mode

   Once loaded, you can start editing by right-clicking on the particular shapefile in the layers panel. A red star will appear next to the filename indicating that the layer is already in edit mode. The Layer Editor menu will also appear in the top toolbar allowing you to have access to the different editing tools.

3. Start Editing

   In order to start editing, the feature should be selected first. Click the Select button, and draw a rectangle covering all or part of the feature to be modified. The nodes should be highlighted as shown below.

   

   • Move Shape – Once the feature is selected (i.e. nodes are highlighted), you can start draging the selected features to another location. Note that the ‘Move Shape’ tool is activated by default after entering into edit mode.
   • Add Vertex – Allows you to insert a node between two existing nodes.
   • Move Vertex – Move a particular node to another location.
   • Delete Vertex – Remove a node.
   • Rotate – When clicked, a new window will appear allowing you to specify the rotation options (e.g. the angle of rotation, the pivot point of rotation, and features to rotate)
   • Extend Left – Only applicable for polylines. This allows you to add a line feature which extends from the first/starting node of the selected polyline.
   • Extend Right – Only applicable for polylines. This allows you to add a line feature which extends from the last/end node of the selected polyline.
   • Extend Settings – Allows you to specify the number of points to add per click and minimum distance between points when extending.

4. Save the modifications

   To save the new shape, select Save or Save As from the layer editor menu. Note the save operation will also update any new features added that have not been accepted using the update button and save the associated dbf data to your shapefile.

   To exit the shapefile editing mode, select Stop Edit also from the Layer Editor menu. If there are unsaved changes, Flood Modeller asks if these should be saved on exit. The shapefile editing toolbar then disappears from the Flood Modeller window.