Drawing (*connecting) points to nearest polyline

[AlicePence]

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!

[SepheFox]

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.

[SepheFox · Accepted solution]

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

[DarrenWiens2]

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.