Hello fine folks!
I would like to create an internal web app or other means by which my non and/or novice GIS colleagues can take an Excel spreadsheet and perform the following process. I’m open to any suggestions of apps or any other processes. Please keep in mind I am unfamiliar with scripting/coding, but have been using GIS for 20+ years so am comfortable with the instant apps, geoprocessing, analysis and most other processes outside the realm of web development requiring code.
The skinny: I receive a spreadsheet from colleagues asking which statistical areas (polygons) are within 40km of the buildings (points) that they give me. I have the static layer of polygons mapped and the buildings are given to me in the form of a spreadsheet (Excel) with coordinates and other info such as names, title info, etc.
Here is the process that I currently perform:
- Add the spreadsheet to Pro, then create points via the XY Table to Point from the context menu after right clicking on the table.
- Use the Generate a Near Table tool with the new point layer (as the input features) identifying all, not just the closest, polygons (near features) within 40km.
- The polygon layer is unchanging and contains about 150 features.
- Going back to the generated Near Table, I perform two joins in order to have a final table with all the attribute information from both layers.
- The IN_FID is joined to the point layer’s table (ObjectID), the NEAR_FID is joined to the polygon layer.
- The final joined table is then copied and pasted as a separate worksheet into the original spreadsheet.
A caveat to be aware of-the spreadsheet that I receive does not typically contain the same amount or type of columnar data, though it always contains the lat/long fields.
I wrote the above process as simple as possible for anyone who would like to read and/or offer solutions to it, but if there are additional details needed to help in my query, please just let me know. Also, if an app/tool is too complex or difficult to make, I would entertain the idea of using model builder where a newer GIS user could simply drag the spreadsheet into the model. I attempted this a few years back for my own ease, but I couldn’t get the iterations down perfectly; since I was the only one at the time needing to do the analysis, I just kept doing the process as described above.
Thanks for any assistance and ideas! Oh, and if this post would be better placed elsewhere, kindly let me know too :).
