Clipping linear feature with polygon

[MarkBalman]

Hi All

I have been trying to clip some tracking data to a polygon region of interest and have run into a problem with the resulting clipped track increasing number of vertices as opposed to a reduction. In some cases, a track with 120,170 vertices is increased to 4,886,588 which is unworkable and frustrating. Has anyone else experienced this and if so, how to resolve? I have used both manual clipping (not ideal as I have approx 600 tracks to process) and via model builder, each case is the same. Am using ArcGIS 10.4 and ArcGIS Pro.

Hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Cheers

Mark

[JayantaPoddar]

Are you working with shapefiles (output)? Try saving the output (of Clip tool) as a File Geodatabase Feature Class. Let me know if the issue still persists.

[MarkBalman]

Hi Jayanta

Same issue irrespective of shapefile or geodatabase feature class. One thing to add is that the region of interest polygon is complex (spanning numerous countries as well as containing holes e.g. countries not involved). If I generalise this and remove the holes the processing works as expected however this is not an ideal fix though.

Many thanks,

Mark

[JayantaPoddar]

If there are duplicate vertices, they could be removed using Repair Geometry.

[shan_sarkar]

Mark,

1) Your source or the input dataset is it a feature class or a shapefile? 

2) Is the projection for the input and clip feature the same? If not can we have them in the same projection system. IT has been observed that there sometimes there are issues with GCS projection while executing Clip tool.

3) I would run Check Geometry—Help | ArcGIS Desktop on the input dataset first and check if there are some geometrical errors. If in case there are issues with the geometry take a backup of the data and run the Repair Geometry—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

Please refer Checking and repairing geometries—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

I hope this helps!

~Shan

[MarkBalman]

Hi Shan

Many thanks for suggestions however, both datasets have been run through repair geometry (no issues), both datasets have same coordinate system and it doesn't matter whether the data are geodatabase feature layers or shapefiles, the problem still persists.

Best,

Mark

[shan_sarkar]

Mark,

Would it be feasible to share a sample data?

~Shan

[MarkBalman]

Hi Shan

Unfortunately I cannot share this data.

[MarkBalman]

Hi All

In case anyone else has had this problem, I managed to work around the problem by using the densify tool. Densifying these tracks has enabled me to clip the tracks much more rapidly than just trying to clip without densifying, somewhat counter intuitive but has worked a treat!

Cheers

Mark