Sunday, 20 December 2015

Creating Multi-Part Polygons that touch internally using ArcGIS Desktop?


I have a set of parcels as illustrated in the image below. There are currently no multi-part features in dataset. What I would like to do is to merge (not the right word) all of the parcels with same address, say 421 for example. I want to have these three polygons as one multi-part polygon, that still has the same geometry, as in it doesn't dissolve the lines.



Image 1


When I have tried this thus far, the lines dissolve resulting in only the boundary being preserved.


Image 2


I feel like there is a super easy was to do this, but I can't find it. I have full access to ArcGIS Advanced and use it to manage the topology of this dataset.



Answer



I think this is an ideal candidate for an ArcGIS Idea (if there is not already one).


The Online Help for Multipart Polygons says (with my bolding):



Keep in mind that parts in a multipart polygon are spatially separated. They can touch each other at vertices, but they cannot share edges or overlap. When you are sketching a multipart polygon, any parts that share an edge will be merged into a single part when you finish the sketch. In addition, any overlap among parts will be removed, leaving a hole in the polygon.




So it seems like you are hitting a limitation in the design of multipart polygon features within shapefiles and geodatabase feature classes.


Why that limitation is there I do not know because your use case seems like a valid one.


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