Find Nearest Outside of Polygon

Question

Hi,

Hopefully someone will be able to help me with the following problem I am trying to solve.

I have a list of spatial polygons (town boundaries) and then a separate list of locations (centroids), I would like to find the nearest location that falls outside of each polygon (almost all the polygon contains 1-2 of the location centroids. Therefore I need to find nearest, excluding any points that fall within a polygon.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Joe

philipmannering · Answer

You could also use the Distance Tool and return a distance of zero if point is within the polygon. Example attached.

Nearest point not in polygon.yxmd

JosephSerpis · Answer

HI @JoeMapsG you can use the spatial match tool as a filter to first find the locations that fall inside a ploygon then isolate those records from your list of locations then use a Find the Nearest tool with the remaining list of locations to find the nearest from the points that fall outside of a polygon.