topic Re: ArcPro: .aprx Glitched- Shut Down- and Deleted Geometry of a Shapefile (Version: Pro 3.7.0) in ArcGIS Pro Questions

ArcPro: .aprx Glitched- Shut Down- and Deleted Geometry of a Shapefile (Version: Pro 3.7.0)

BLGW — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:45:41 GMT

ArcPro 3.7.0

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience:

Long story short, upon calculating geometry for a very simply polygon, ArcPro took FOREVER to run the calculate geometry tool, and then eventually, it gave up and the entire software shut itself down and closed out. When I came back into the map, the shapefile I had been working in was completely wiped of geometry. All of the attributes and .dbf information was still there, but the physical features/ polygons were completely gone.

Details:

-The shapefile has never had issues before.

-The map I was working in was not overloaded or large. It had a few basic vector shps in it.

-I opened the shapefile in a new, blank map and the geometry did not return.

-The shapefile is not large or complex. Approx 800 basic polygon features with only 8 attribute fields, all of which are basic (Name, area etc) fields.

-I tried the repair geometry tool and it did not fix anything.

-I recalculated the spatial index and that did not fix anything.

-I ran the "Check Geometry" tool and it returned a table that told me there was "Null Geometry" for all of my features.

This is crazy scary. I was EXTREMELY lucky that I had a back up of this shapefile, but had I not- years worth of data would have been gone in the blink of an eye from running the most basic of GIS tools (Calculate geometry). Has anyone else had this problem? Are there ways to prevent this from happening again? Are there ways I could have tried to restore the geometry to the original shapefile had I not had an extra copy?

Re: ArcPro: .aprx Glitched- Shut Down- and Deleted Geometry of a Shapefile (Version: Pro 3.7.0)

DanPatterson — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:52:48 GMT

keep your backup shapefile

copy the shapefile to a featureclass in a file geodatabase

Do your calculations on it and use it for your work

Export it to a new shapefile and see how that goes

Shapefiles are becoming less likely to be useful going forward given that the numeric and string types are moving forward well beyond what shapefiles support.

Re: ArcPro: .aprx Glitched- Shut Down- and Deleted Geometry of a Shapefile (Version: Pro 3.7.0)

Robert_LeClair — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:19:54 GMT

What geoproce3ssing tool are you using? Calculate Geometry Attributes or another GP tool?

Re: ArcPro: .aprx Glitched- Shut Down- and Deleted Geometry of a Shapefile (Version: Pro 3.7.0)

BLGW — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:15:24 GMT

Using Calculate Geometry tool via the attributes table: