topic Re: corrupt shapefile after edit session in Data Management Questions

corrupt shapefile after edit session

JohnMarino — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:54:57 GMT

I seem to be experiencing some strange behavior in ArcGIS 10.0. What's happening is that I have a number of polyline shapefiles that I am editing (deleting and modifying several segments of the lines). However, it seems that about 7 out of 10 times after I am finished editing a particular shapefile, it becomes corrupted. Whenever I try to open the shapefile again, I get the "number of shapes does not match the number of table records" error, at which point I have to use a shapefile repair utility to correct the problem. It appears that the problem each time is that there is an extraneous number of records in the dbf table, but I have no idea what's causing this to occur. Is this some sort of known issue, or is there perhaps something I am overlooking, missing, or doing incorrectly?

Re: corrupt shapefile after edit session

DanPatterson_Retired — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:02:30 GMT

By any chance are you deleting rows from the attribute table rather than deleting the features themselves? The former aspect will surely cause a corrupt shapefile

Re: corrupt shapefile after edit session

JohnMarino — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:12:56 GMT

Nope, I believe I am deleting the features themselves. However I do generally merge several of the features - might this be related?

Re: corrupt shapefile after edit session

DanPatterson_Retired — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:25:40 GMT

I don't think so...but I wouldn't recommend experimenting on a good file... I did a search on google using this exact search

"number of shapes does not match the number of table records" edit session

and it yielded a lot of links. There are suggested ways of fixing this and this at least one KB article on potential means to recover the file, but I suggest you examine your workflow and see if you find a match. It is sometimes hit or miss...

Re: corrupt shapefile after edit session

JohnMarino — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:40:44 GMT

it seems like a lot of what I've come across are one-time instances of people having corrupt shapefiles but I haven't found much similar to what I'm experiencing, which leads me to believe it's something I'm doing. I'll keep poking around and see if I can notice any regularities with respect to when my files seem to become corrupted.