Analysis tools-Split:error with empty geometry

Question

Dear all,

I'm sorry to post a question about Analysis tools in this Spatial Analyst sub-forum, while I couldn't find a better place and this is urgent.
My goal is to get individual country shapefile from "World Countries??? dataset made by ESRI.
I followed these steps in Arcmap 10:
1) searched for "World Countries" from "ArcGIS onlin" function and added "world countries.shp"
2) select all countries in each continent and save as continent shapefile, say "Asia.shp"
3) Data Management Tools-Generalization-Dissolve "Asia.shp" by attribute "COUNTRY", save as "Asia_dissolve.shp"
4) Analysis Tools-Extract-Split "Asia_dissolve.shp" based on "COUNTRY" attribute to get "#.shp" for each country in Asia

Step 4) failed with error report of "the operation was attempted on an empty geometry".

I don't understand what may cause this error and how to solve this. Sincerely looking forward to any suggestions and solutions.

Thanks a lot.

Danxia

NeilAyres · Answer

Of a bigger mystery to me is why you would want to do this in the first place?
Why take a single feature class (in your case a shapefile....) and split it into many shapefiles by a country id? Many more files to manage and keep track of, instead of one.
If you just want to see a single country polygon on your map then simply use the definition query on the properties page of the layer.
Cheers,
Neil

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RamB · Answer

Hi

Split works on geometry, not on attributes.

please try 'Multipart to single part' option and then use 'dissolve'.

regards,

DanxiaSong · Answer

Hi 
Thanks a lot for replying. I checked geometry and it returned a empty table, so I assume the geometry has no problem.
The Asia_dissolve.shp I used for dissolve has unique value in attribulte "COUNTRY". The dissolve step ran successfully.
But in order to get individual country.shp from Asia_dissolve.shp, I used SPLIT function. The "empty geometry" error happened in this step. Any idea or any other function rather than SPLIT allows me to get individual country.shp?

Thanks.Hi,

1, please use 'check geometry' to see the problems and fix it by using repair geometry. if you are using for first time, please backup your data.
2, you cannot dissolve based on country. make sure you make new attribute 'continent' and fill asia for all asian countries. then dissolve it. dissolve tool works by merging all features that have 'same' value of attribute in the selected field.