topic Re: Data Driven Pages: Multiple Shapes in Groups in Data Management Questions

Data Driven Pages: Multiple Shapes in Groups

DarrochKaye — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 10:00:34 GMT

Hello all,

I've used DDP many times and they are great, however I want to use them in a different way for a current project and I'm stumped.

I have 28 individual polygon features, which I have grouped into 14 groups. I say "grouped"; I have a field called TA_GROUP which has group names.

I want the DDP to index on the groups, not the individual features. When I try to create DDP with the Groups as the index attribute, I get the full 28 maps, instead of the 14 groups.

The TA_GROUP field is in a text file which I've joined to the main dataset, but I don't see this being the issue. As such, I don't want to dissolve the dataset as it is used elsewhere, hence why I did the join instead of adding a field to the dataset. I also don't want to create a copy the dataset solely for this purpose as that increasesversion control and storage space issues.

Does anyone have any ideas how DDP can index multiple features based on a common attribute, without fundamentally altering the dataset?

Thanks.

Re: Data Driven Pages: Multiple Shapes in Groups

FC_Basson — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 11:08:48 GMT

Dissolve the features on the attribute (with Create Multipart features option checked) and then run the DDP on the new layer without displaying it, using the group attribute as identifier.

Re: Data Driven Pages: Multiple Shapes in Groups

DarrochKaye — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 12:24:51 GMT

Yeah - I think this is what I'm going to have to do. I don't particularly want to create an additional dataset but I can't seem to avoid this when using the Dissolve tool.