connectToClosestPoint

Connect To Closest Point

Creates an output polyline layer with single segmented polylines that connect each point of the input Point layer to it's closest neighbor. The function uses a robust algorithm and can be applied on datasets containing up to 2 million points.

Inputs:

A Point feature layer
Cutoff distance - the maximum distance to search for neighbor points.
Add Duplicate Links option (see notes below)

Outputs:

A new Polyline layer. The attribute table of the resulting layer will have three new fields
- [ET_From] - the ID of the FROM point
- [ET_To] - the ID of the TO point
- [ET_Dist] - the distance from the point to the closest point

Notes:

If the distance from a point to the closest point is larger than the Cutoff distance then no link will be created between the two points
If there are coincident points in the input dataset, the duplicates will be ignored.
The direction of the resulting polyline is always from the evaluated point to the closest point found.
If there are 2 points "A" and "B" where point "B" is the closest neighbor of point "A" and point "A" is the closest neighbor of point "B"
- If the Add Duplicate Links option is selected, the resulting feature class will have 2 duplicate links - one from "A" to "B and one from "B" to "A"
- If the Add Duplicate Links option is NOT selected, then only one of the two links will be stored in the output.

Examples:

Result Dataset - Add Duplicate Links option NOT selected

The closest point to point 8 is point 10.
The closest point to point 10 is point 8
Only one link is added - from point 8 to point 10

No Duplicates

Result Dataset - Add Duplicate Links option NOT selected

The closest point to point 8 is point 10.
The closest point to point 10 is point 8
Two coincident links are added - from point 8 to point 10 and from point 10 to point 8

Duplicates added

Running Programmatically

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Parameters

Expression	Explanation
Function Name	ConnectToClosestPoint
<input dataset>	A String representing the input layer. Must be of Point type.
<output dataset>	A String - the full name of the output layer.
<CutOff Distance>	A Double representing the CutOff Distance( in the units of the spatial reference of the input dataset).
{Add Duplicates}	A Boolean indicating whether duplicate links will be added to the result.

Running the function

ETGWPath used in the table below is the full path to ETGWRun.exe (E.G. "C:\Program Files\ETSpatial Techniques\ETGeo Wizards\ETGWRun.exe")

Language	Syntax
Python	subprocess.call([ETGWPath, "ConnectToClosestPoint", "input dataset", "output dataset", "CutOff Distance", "Add Duplicates"])
.NET using ETGWRun.exe	StartInfo.FileName = ETGWPath StartInfo.Arguments = "ConnectToClosestPoint" "input dataset" "output dataset" "CutOff Distance" "Add Duplicates"
.NET using ETGWOutX.dll	ConnectToClosestPoint(input dataset, output dataset, CutOff Distance, Add Duplicates)
ArcPy	arcpy.ConnectToClosestPoint(input dataset, output dataset, "CutOff Distance", "Add Duplicates")

Notes:

<> - required parameter
{} - optional parameter
See examples for Python , .NET or ArcPy
The argument separator for StartInfo.Arguments is space. If a string might contain a space, you need to double quote it.

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