Currently, when using the dissolve tool, and the create multi-part features option is unchecked, features in the resulting feature class that had the same dissolve field attribute all get the same value for each statistic field. Ideally, the tool should respect spatial relationships and, when you specify to not to create multi-part features, the attributes of the output features should accurately reflect what was actually dissolved and not the aggregate of all features with a common attribute. This is probably better explained as an example.
Let's say I have a feature class has three features. All have the same value in the dissolve field but only two of the features are adjacent. Each feature has another attribute called foo and this field is used as a statistic field. The statistic type for foo is SUM. The values for foo are 1, 2 and 3. The two adjacent features have values of 2 and 3 for foo. When I run dissolve with create multi-part features unchecked, the two resulting features both have values of 6 for foo but the values should be 5 (for the two adjacent features that were dissolved) and 1 for the feature that is not adjacent to the other features.
Two NIMs related to this request are: NIM013409 and NIM035670.
