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I'm fairly new to GIS and I'm having an issue that I hope someone can help me resolve?

Basically, what I'm trying to do is merge features based on a single attribute so that my table no longer displays the duplicates and the features are merged/grouped on screen. Other than going through my attribute table and manually selecting the features before clicking 'merge', the only other way that I could think to do this would be to use 'dissolve'. However, using this tool causes the features that are touching or overlapping to become one entity, which is the opposite to what I want to achieve.

In short, I wish to keep my features as separate entities that are grouped/merged together based on a single attribute whilst removing duplicates from my attribute table - is this possible?

Also, it's worth noting that I have 1000's of features to do this with, so I'm looking for an automated method of some kind?

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If I am understanding correctly, you want to create a multi part polygon based on attributes where the lines of contiguous polygons don't get dissolved/removed? If so, I don't know if that is possible.

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.

from http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//01m600000066000000

also a discussion over here https://geonet.esri.com/thread/122592

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It seems like you are looking for the join/relate features after reading the question. You can read more about joining and relating tables to get a better understanding of how to operate these tools and what these tools can do so you can determine which solution will work best for you. Also if you haven't looked at it the Union tool offers a way to combine multiple layers while maintaining the individuality of the features within the layer.

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  • I'm not sure that this is the solution that I'm looking for, but I thank you for taking the time to respond.
    – Luke
    Commented Aug 4, 2015 at 15:18
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I think you are looking to create multipart features. The Merge tool creates multipart feature (despite what the visual on the help page shows, the polygons' line will be maintained if they don't overlap). you can also try to Merge through the Editor toolbar.

You would to build a python script to automate this or try the iterator tools in model builder.

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