topic Re: Drawing (*connecting) points to nearest polyline in Spatial Data Science Questions

Drawing (*connecting) points to nearest polyline

AlicePence — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 16:21:41 GMT

We have a bunch of points (water meters) and would like to see if there is a way to connect to the closest polyline (water lines) by building a script to have the points automatically connect to the nearest polyline (or a geoprocessing tool?)

Thanks!

Re: Drawing (*connecting) points to nearest polyline

SepheFox — Wed, 06 May 2015 02:40:27 GMT

Hi Alice, the ET geowizards add-in (ArcGIS tools add-ons and extensions from ET SpatialTechniques ) has a great tool called perpendiculars to polylines which does exactly that. The free version has limited use, but it might be worth your while to buy the license.

Re: Drawing (*connecting) points to nearest polyline

SepheFox — Wed, 06 May 2015 02:43:09 GMT

Oh, here you go. I found a free script that does just this: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=0a4892bd754146e48b87de2352cdf64d

Re: Drawing (*connecting) points to nearest polyline

DarrenWiens2 — Wed, 06 May 2015 16:37:55 GMT

Thanks for pointing out this tool, Sephe (I wasn't aware of it). It solves most of the problem, but not the case where the point is not perpendicular to the line (see below), although that can be handled through other means. It's much easier to connect points to end vertices than to the line geometry itself. The script you linked to promises to do both cases, but I haven't tried it.