Feature Dissolve

okay in this video we're going to talk about dissolving feature classes and in this case we're going to working with vector data and what we are interested in doing here is actually simplifying a group of polygons into a single polygon the idea here is that sometimes we have a fairly complex feature and what we really only want is its outline and rather than digitizing it or copying its perimeter what we're going to simply do is dissolve it based either on an attribute or simply based on a simple dissolve in this case we're going to be doing simple dissolves so anytime you want to do this the easy thing to do is to actually open up the search options and you can see the search option right here has a little world I've mine docked here so I'm going to click on that actually all you have dissolve typed in but I've just typed dissolve and you'll notice that dissolve appears right here under data management now I could just click on it here I'll do that and it will open up the tool I don't think just a minute there it is and the tool shows you what the results of the process would be but what I also want to show you is that any time you find a tool you'll notice that you can also if you hover over the lower you will see the path in your toolbox and so in this case again if I hover over that we'll see that this is in the system toolbox it's data management generalization so now I'm going to click on my toolbox and if I were to look at it then and we were to open up again it's a data management and I got ahead of myself there data management and then we had generalization any of those there's dissolved and I'll in fact by clicking on that I'll get the same tool so that's what we're going to do now and in this case what I'm going to do I want to take the slippery Rock Creek those two polygons and I want to simply get their boundary so I'm going to click on that select it and again wait for the tool to process takes a moment here and then what we're going to do is in this case our output feature we're going to set it to go to my working folder and I will be on my desktop under not terribly creative dissolve I'm going to are working database here but this is going to be SR Creek and I'm gonna put an underscore D is for dissolve now if I wanted to dissolve multiple features into different categories I could in fact select a dissolve field that had those values in it I'm not going to do that if I leave it blank you'll notice if it says optional optional means I don't have to do anything there I'm also not going to calculate any statistics fields you'll notice that what I could have done is if I put in here for example the area I could have actually determined the average area you'll notice how I'm going to do animal get rid of it if I put an area and then I took that and I said I wanted the mean I could in fact calculate that now I'm not going to do that because I don't really want any of these attribute calculations to occur I'm going to do that after the fact I also don't want a multi-part feature we would use that if we had polygons that were disjointed in other words they were in different areas but we wanted them to dissolve and be treated as a multi-part feature and again we don't have that in this case we're not going to do it I'm simply going to click OK leaving everything blank and you'll notice down at the bottom tools running you can see the process down at the bottom and there it is we get a correct answer it's doing it and you'll notice now that the result that popped up the line between the two has been eliminated now I'm going to do the next one similar process for the overall study and again we'll use the same tool our input feature now the overall study again we're going to put it into the overall study underscore D is and we'll click Save again I don't really need any of these statistics in here and so we're not gonna have a multi-part feature leave it alone and I'm going to simply click OK again the process we run it now what we've essentially done is created our two polygons that will be used for future analysis and so again if I kind of bring this one up you can see now we have our two generalized polygon features okay that's the basic concepts of dissolved remember that we could have dissolved the entire state based on a case field and that's really a very efficient tool to simplify your data but remain or retain certain characteristics again later in the class we'll look at that process again see you next time

Channel: Jack Livingston

Views: 23,734

Rating: 4.8446603 out of 5

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Id: bUa1dI-f1zc

Length: 5min 27sec (327 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2016