RivEX

This is an important step and should not be ignored, do not assume the network you have been provided/downloaded is free of error! Core to many of the algorithms used by RivEX is the requirement that polylines flow in a source to sea direction and free of error.  RivEX provides a suite of tools that search for specific errors in a river network that would cause the attribution algorithms to fail or worse, run without failing but attribute the network incorrectly.

It is strongly recommended you run your network through all quality control tools and correct errors if found before continuing on to the attribution stage.

All the quality controls are very easy to run, simply go to RivEX Toolbox > Quality Control Tools > choose your tool. Typically you need only select the river network which you would have normally loaded into the active map and click Run.

If errors are found they are reported in an Error Log Table.  It is up to you to review and make an informed decision on what to do to fix the issue(s).

Any editing to the network will mean the topology has been altered and you would need to re-run the extract topology tool to generate new up to date cache files. It is recommended you do your edits in bulk then run the extract topology tool.  Some error types are variants of each other and fixing one error can actually resolve another.  Networks with a significant number of errors will take a long time to resolve.

So important is it to remove errors from your network that RivEX tracks which quality controls have run and reported no errors.  It will continue to you warn until you have run the quality control tool successfully.

Having identified and fixed errors you are now ready to add attribution to the network.

If you need to run several quality control tools on different networks, why not build a model and string them together? An example is shown below of three quality controls tools that you might want to string together.

An example model to demonstrating the use of RivEX quality control tools as a model.