idea Delete empty fields in Attribute Table in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Delete empty fields in Attribute Table

MartinPrinz — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:16:43 GMT

While self-preparing original OSM data cleaning up the attribute table it is really annoying. This because of the fact, that a huge amount of fields (nearly 100!) exist within each dataset, that contain no information (about 80 %). Therefore it would be nice to have an additional option in the "Delete Field "- Tool for deleting empty fields.

Re: Delete empty fields in Attribute Table

DuncanHornby — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:03:02 GMT

I like this idea I can see myself using such functionality.

The problem is how do you define "empty"? If there was a string field in a GeoDatabase you could have <Null> entries or they could all be set as "". But <Null> is not supported in Shapefiles. What about other storage formats? A numeric field field in a shapefile must have a number, add a new numeric field to a shapefile and they are all set to zero. But what if you are using zero as a meaningful value say in a binary flag field?

I like the idea of dropping "empty" fields but more thought needs to go into defining what empty means.

Re: Delete empty fields in Attribute Table

MartinPrinz — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:10:50 GMT

@Hornbydd
Yes, I thought about that, but I didn't want to make it to complicated. ;-).

Re: Delete empty fields in Attribute Table

Kevin_MacLeod — Fri, 09 May 2025 20:37:35 GMT

great idea. We need this. I'll be engineering it myself in Python but this would be useful out of the box.