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I have a situation in which I have both network buffers and circular buffers around the same points (as separate feature classes), and I want to merge the buffers and dissolve into one polygon for each point.

The complication arises in that some of the points are close together so their buffers overlap; thus when I dissolve, both the network and circular buffers dissolve, but also the boundaries between buffers that are close together. But I need to maintain one row for each point feature.

Image shows the overlap between network and circular buffers, but also points with overlapping buffers.

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You need to dissolve on a field--the field(s) that contains the unique identifier(s) for your points.

This is known as your "Dissolve Field(s)", as described in ESRI's help for the tool.

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  • Your solution is correct. I believe I overlooked this obvious answer because, in the network buffer creation process the unique identifier field was modified; as a result, in the merged file, half of the rows (the network buffers) were null for the original unique identifier field, but had the modified identifier field, and the other half (the circular buffers) were null for the modified identifier field. So the simple solution, that didn't occur to me until you answered, was to use the field calculator to fill in the nulls for the unique identifier. Thank you. – G. Vazquez Mar 26 '16 at 19:55

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