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I have shapefile (the 48MB just below the table here) showing borders of different levels in administrative hierarchies (e.g. borders within communities, between communities, and between federal states). I want to display data of communities now with QGIS. If I do that in a straightforward way by importing an Excel file containing the values of the communities and joining that, it nicely depicts the different levels, but also the borders within the communities. Is there a way to hide these inside-borders?

I could work around that problem in this special case by simply using a different shapefile, but I ran into that problem several times now and want to know whether there is a more elegant solution than using different shape files for different administrative levels.

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  • I speak no German, unlike your excellent English. However, looking at the data you have a number of attributes. Does one of them identify the administrative hierarchy level? If so, just use that in you style.
    – MappaGnosis
    Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 15:54
  • @MappaGnosis: Thanks a lot for your quick reply (and for flattering me ;-) )! It could easily be the case that I oversee something obvious as I'm quite new to QGIS (and GIS in general), but aren't the attributes tied to the areas? It's not problem to properly display the data of each community, but I want to hide the borders within the communities. I would need something like to "overpaint" them with the community's colour, but that does not work the way I want.
    – defferl
    Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 16:10
  • @defferl The easiest way to hide something is not to draw it. Setting the border width to 0 seems to have no effect. But setting border color to fill color makes the borders invisible. Its also possible to set border style to "kein Stift", then borders are not drawn at all.
    – Detlev
    Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 16:41
  • @Detlev Cheers too! I tinkered around with that kind of solution several times and found that 0-width-issue at least annoying. So I set the width to a veeeeery small value (compared to the resulting file's dpi). Still, it does not help since that removes all borders, not just the ones I want to hide (or is there a(n automatic) way to treat them differently?). Using the fill colour as border colour leads to the problem that different areas have different fill colours...
    – defferl
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 10:29

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It would be great if we could choose to display an inner boundary simply by clicking on something or by unchecking a box… deleting the inner secondary boundaries is usually something I'm reluctant to do as I might need that data later and… 1 shapefile is better than 2 shapefiles… in my opinion, in GIS, less is more! :)

So after checking your file, assuming GB stands for Gebiete and BL for Bundesland, and you want to display just the BL border while still keeping the data for the GB I have to say: dissolve boundaries by the BL attribute, creating a new shapefile and group the two files with the GB one being under the first one.

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  • Agree 100%! Unfortunately editing 48MBs is not what I hoped for ;-) I already voted your answer up, but my reputation is not yet high enough.
    – defferl
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 10:38
  • Worry not, I'm also fairly new here! If it is of any consolation, these days 48MB is close to nothing. You'll be through with it faster than you and I probably think.
    – sig_renato
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 15:30

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