Unions a
Collection of
Geometrys or a single Geometry (which may be a
GeoometryCollection) together. By using this special-purpose operation over a collection of geometries it is possible to take advantage of various optimizations to improve performance. Heterogeneous
GeometryCollections are fully supported.
The result obeys the following contract:
Unioning a set of Polygons has the effect of merging the areas (i.e. the same effect as iteratively unioning all individual polygons together).
Unioning a set of LineStrings has the effect of noding and dissolving the input linework. In this context "fully noded" means that there will be an endpoint or node in the result for every endpoint or line segment crossing in the input. "Dissolved" means that any duplicate (i.e. coincident) line segments or portions of line segments will be reduced to a single line segment in the result. This is consistent with the semantics of the Geometry.union(Geometry)
operation. If merged linework is required, the LineMerger class can be used.
Unioning a set of Points has the effect of merging all identical points (producing a set with no duplicates).
UnaryUnion always operates on the individual components of MultiGeometries. So it is possible to use it to "clean" invalid self-intersecting MultiPolygons (although the polygon components must all still be individually valid.)