The Dissolve tool can be used to remove the interior, or shared, boundaries within a vector coverage. You can either dissolve all interior boundaries or dissolve those boundaries along polygons with the same value of a user-specified attribute within the shapefile's attribute table. It may be desirable to use the Vector Cleaning tool to correct any topological errors resulting from the slight misalignment of nodes along shared boundaries in the vector coverage before performing the Dissolve operation.
The following is an example of a Python script that uses this tool:
wd = pluginHost.getWorkingDirectory()
# Input data has the shapefile name followed
# by the attribute included in the analysis,
# separated by semicolons.
inputData = wd + "input.shp" + ";" + "AREA"
outputFile = wd + "output.shp"
args = [inputData, outputFile]
pluginHost.runPlugin("Dissolve", args, False)
This is a Groovy script also using this tool:
def wd = pluginHost.getWorkingDirectory()
// Input data has the shapefile name followed
// by the attribute included in the analysis,
// separated by semicolons.
def inputData = wd + "input.shp" + ";" + "AREA"
def outputFile = wd + "output.shp"
String[] args = [inputData, outputFile]
pluginHost.runPlugin("Dissolve", args, false)