topic Re: Spatial sorting of polygons in Geoprocessing Questions

Spatial sorting of polygons

MihaKlemencic — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 20:17:31 GMT

I am looking for tool to spatial sort polygons in shapefile. Sorting should be done on certain attribute which is more important than others:

Polygons with atribute values Ced must be spatially sorted on top, then Bud, Gog and so on. Polygons with values Bid must be spatially sorted on the bottom.

I need this shapefile structure for symbolizing layer in gis software (developed inside company)which does not support symbol levels in cartography as ArcGIS does.

I found 4 tools:

Sort (Data management): this tool has 5 predefined algorithms but does not allow spatially sort by attributes
and two other tools: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=b28e04f7d4e846229a2580f0cbdd29e1 and http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=d2ce3b7b11314d9cbc3f588f4d01c0a8. I assume that these 2 tools also do not allow polygons to be spatially sorted by attributes.
what about qgis plugin?

Any other solution?

Re: Spatial sorting of polygons

DanPatterson_Retired — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 20:25:53 GMT

a quick solution

split the layer into separate shapefiles http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=15ca63aebb4647a4b07bc94f3d051da5 (inputs and outputs have to be shapefiles for a variety of reasons)
use the merge tool in arctoolbox to get them in the order you want

should take about a minute

Re: Spatial sorting of polygons

JoshuaBixby — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 21:09:46 GMT

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "spatially sort?" It appears to me you are primarily sorting by attribute, e.g. Ced. Do you want to spatially sort within that attribute? If so, what spatial attribute of the polygon do you want to sort on?

Re: Spatial sorting of polygons

MihaKlemencic — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 18:45:37 GMT

Sort (Data management) solves the problem You have to add new column (i.e. Rang). Polygons that I want to be on top, were given value 1, other were given value 2. In Sort tool you choose Rang as field and descending sort method.