I had a map of city limits in Brazil (thousands of entries) and I needed to make a dissolve opearation to get a map of states. Arc couldn’t do it, alway returned and error (invalid data in the table). I tried the “check/fix geometry” in arc, but also got the same error.

ogr2ogr worked perfectly, and with the new shape I could do all the operations I needed.

tks for this post, keep up the good work.

Why OGR instead of Repair geometry? Simply because it works better and more consistently for me. I typically don’t have time to troubleshoot a variety of options so I go with the tool that works.

http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=checking%20and%20repairing%20geometries

If OGR is able to fix problems that ESRI’s built-in tool cannot, they should be aware of the issue. Considering ESRI is relying more on GDAL/OGR for some of its translation tasks, I doubt they would have reservations using OGR’s method for fixing shapefiles, if that fix handles more issues than their own solution.

http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.2/body.cfm?tocVisable=1&ID=2458&TopicName=Supported%20raster%20dataset%20file%20formats

As Jamey mentions, Repair Geometry should take care of most of your problems. Asger’s problem (null geom in shp) is handled by the Repair Geometry tool.

For instance we recently came across a bug in ArcGIS where deleting a feature from a shapefile would result in the geometry being removed from the shp-file but the attributes would still be present in the dbf-file. And thus there would be a different number of records in the shp and the dbf files. ArcGIS crashes on such a shape file. OGR reads and translates it happily, BUT the geometries are not linked to the correct attributes. Depending on the type of data, this kind of error can be extremely difficult to check for.

I find my corrupt shapefiles tend to be those created by non-GIS applications (CADD, and the 3D visualization package EVS). In these cases, the “Repair Geometry” tool (in the ArcToolbox at the ArcView license) is generally enough to fix it.