I want to merge two Canada census shapefiles. The first one (CT) is the smallest unit for the urban regions so there is only census blocks for urban areas and there is no blocks for all the rural areas of the country. The second one (CSD) is covering all the country but the blocks are way bigger in the urban regions. You can see in the screenshots the difference between the two shapefiles.
I want to merge these two shapefile. I want to have the CT and the CSD in the same shapefiles with the CT in urban areas and the CSD in other areas.
I tried using the Merge tool. The display of the shapefile looks good, but if i try to select a CT in a urban area, it selects the CSD behind it.
Is there a way to remove the CSD that are under all the CT, so that after I will merge the two shapefiles ? I tried with the clip tool, but it gives me a TopoEngine error ?!
If you are truly working with shape files, I suggest you import them into a geodatabase of some flavour and work with your data as feature classes there.
I think the error you are getting is because some of your urban areas are islands within the national extent. You might try the erase command which is available only at the ArcInfo licensing level. Ianko.com has his version of the tool as well if you have ArcEdit or ArcView. Once you get your urban areas out of the way, you can union the erased national data to the original urban area. Take a look here and follow the links to your appropriate version of ArcGIS.
