Determine that one layer lies entirely within area of another

[AvaFarouche]

Hello!

I need to determine the extent of overlap of two layers, or, to put it another way, I need to confirm that one of my layers lies entirely within the area of another layer. It looks like there's a way to do this in Business Analyst with Measure Cannibalization, but I don't have BA.

I did a Count Overlapping Features process, but that doesn't answer my question. It shows where 2 layers overlap, and it shows where just one layer exists - but it doesn't tell me which one it is.

I don't think Tabulate Intersection is my answer, because that shows me the area for each feature in the class, and I want to see the area of overlap for the total area of the two layers. I guess I could do this in a two-step process of dissolving both layers and then tabulating intersection of the two?

Any ideas? The layers I'm working with this time aren't very complicated, so I've just done a visual analysis and I'm confident that Layer A lies entirely within Layer B. However, this is something that comes up every once in a while for me and sometimes these are layers that have lots of little pieces and cover large areas and it would be really easy to miss something with a visual analysis. Sometimes I just want to have a mathematical confirmation so there's no possibility of error.

Thanks for any ideas!!

[DanPatterson]

Spatial Join (Analysis)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

with the completely within option

would be worth a look

[AvaFarouche]

Shoot, that didn't do it. But thank you for the suggestion!

[DanPatterson]

do you have visuals of where it didn't work?

Also, make sure you are working with singlepart features and not multipart features which would complicate complete containment.

Multipart To Singlepart (Data Management)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

[AvaFarouche]

Hi, Dan,

Well, it did work, as far as creating a new feature class with one giant attribute table, but it didn't provide anything helpful as far as confirming that one class lies within another. I tried it two ways: with class A as the Target and B as the Join, and vice versa. Basically one of them created a layer that looks exactly like A and the other created a layer that looks exactly like B .. if that makes sense. There was nothing that helped me confirm B was entirely within A, anymore than the original layers did. Maybe I just don't know how to process this correctly?

My original layers are derived from census blocks so I'm pretty sure they should not have multipart features.

[DanPatterson · Accepted solution]

Keep All Target Features
(Optional)

The default is True... 

uncheck this to remove that don't have the spatial relationship

Also you could open the table and see the tabular results of the process and query those that meet your conditions.

[AvaFarouche]

Thanks again, Dan!

Well that provided some interesting results. It produced a feature layer with nothing in it. So that's one way to answer the question, I think?

Thanks for your help!