When writing to Esri Shapefile with multiple geometries, what is true?

When writing to Esri Shapefile with multiple geometries, what is true?

• A. It creates a separate shapefile for each geometry type encountered.
• B. It fails if more than one geometry type is present.
• C. It writes all geometries to a single shapefile.
• D. It ignores features with geometry types not supported.

Answer: (A)

Shapefile format stores only one geometry type per file. When a dataset contains multiple geometry types, the writer splits them into separate shapefiles by type. For example, all points go into a points shapefile and all polygons into a polygons shapefile, with each set accompanied by its own .shp, .shx, and .dbf files. This behavior matches the rule that a single shapefile cannot mix geometry types, so creating a separate shapefile for each geometry type encountered is the correct approach. It wouldn’t fail due to multiple types, it wouldn’t place everything into one file, and it wouldn’t silently ignore unsupported types—those are handled by distributing the data into appropriate type-specific shapefiles.

Shapefile format stores only one geometry type per file. When a dataset contains multiple geometry types, the writer splits them into separate shapefiles by type. For example, all points go into a points shapefile and all polygons into a polygons shapefile, with each set accompanied by its own .shp, .shx, and .dbf files. This behavior matches the rule that a single shapefile cannot mix geometry types, so creating a separate shapefile for each geometry type encountered is the correct approach. It wouldn’t fail due to multiple types, it wouldn’t place everything into one file, and it wouldn’t silently ignore unsupported types—those are handled by distributing the data into appropriate type-specific shapefiles.