Using an ArcGIS Model Builder iterator to merge all shapefiles into one layer? [duplicate]

Question

I have a GeoDatabase with a handful of shapefiles. The contents are likely to change often, so I want to build a tool that allows me to merge all the shapefiles in the GDB into one layer.

This is what I currently have:

However, I am not expecting this to work, as it seems like it would just grab one file each iteration and 'merge' it with itself. Is there a workaround so that it grabs all files from the GDB to merge them? I am using ArcGIS Desktop 10.5.

Answer 1

This is an arcpy solution rather than a ModelBuilder one but I believe it is pretty straightforward. To run it you just have to open the Python console in ArcMap and paste the following lines:

import arcpy

# specify the path to your GDB
arcpy.env.workspace = 'path/name.gdb'

# get all the Feature Classes in the GDB
fcs = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()

# run the Merge tool
arcpy.Merge_management(inputs=fcs, output='merge_result')

This will create a feature class called merge_result in your GDB.