Delete empty fields in Attribute Table

2645
2
04-05-2013 05:42 AM
Status: Open
MartinPrinz
Occasional Contributor
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.

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