Arcade Nearest Feature Function

GeoGalvanic — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 02:45:55 GMT

I think it would be beneficial to include an Arcade function that finds the nearest feature (or potentially features) from a featureSet to a specific feature/geometry.

This is a routine task that has been asked about several times before across the various forums:
https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-questions/using-arcade-to-find-the-nearest-address-point/m-p/108741#M5171

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-questions/arcade-get-4-nearest-addresses-from-point-feature/m-p/463470#M23381

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-field-maps-questions/nearest-address-calculation-expression-in-field/m-p/1176989#M3585

I have written my own code to get my desired result here:

var portalItem = FeatureSetByPortalItem(Portal('https://redacted.com/portal'), 'redactedportalitemid', 1, ["featureDescription"], true) var inputFeature = $feature var nearestFeature var relevantFeaturesBuffer = Buffer($feature, 500, "meters") var relevantFeatures = Intersects(portalItem, relevantFeaturesBuffer) function compareShortestDistance(a,b){ return Distance(Geometry(a), Geometry(inputFeature)) - Distance(Geometry(b), Geometry($feature)) } for (var feature in relevantFeatures){ if (nearestFeature == null) { nearestFeature = feature } else if (compareShortestDistance(nearestFeature, feature) > 0){ nearestFeature = feature } } return nearestFeature.featureDescription

This does work and meet my needs, however I feel that it is still inefficient. You may notice that there is a buffer and intersection used to filter "relevant" features that are nearby (hardcoded 500m). This is necessary because if the portalItem contains a large number of features then the distance comparison becomes prohibitively slow. If instead there is a nearest function created by ESRI it should be possible to better optimize the function by taking advantage of backend tools like spatial indexes.

What I'm proposing is a function like such:
Nearest(featureSet, feature/geometry, numberOfReturnedFeatures?) => feature/featureSet

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Arcade Nearest Feature Function