findClosestPoint

Find Closest Point

Calculates the distance for each point of a point dataset to the closest point from the same dataset. The function produces similar results as the Closest Feature Distance, but uses a robust algorithm and can be applied on datasets containing up to 8 million points.

Inputs:

A Point feature layer
Cutoff distance - the maximum distance to search for neighbor points.

Outputs:

A new Point feature class. The attribute table of the resulting feature class will have three new fields
- [ET_ID] - the ID of the feature
- [ET_Dist] - the distance from the point to the closest point.
- [ET_Closest] - the ID of the closest point.

Notes:

If the distance from a point to the closest point is larger than the Cutoff distance then the [ET_Dist] will have a value of 0 and [ET_ Closest] will have a value of -1
If there are coincident points in the input dataset, only one of the coincident point will be assigned a closest neighbor. The other points in the same location will have values ET_Dist = 1 and ET_Closest = -1
The bigger the search tolerance is, the slower the process will be
The distance is calculated in the units of the Spatial Reference of the input dataset

Running Programmatically

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Parameters

Expression	Explanation
Function Name	FindClosestPoint
<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 maximum distance between two points to be considered neghbors - in the units of the spatial reference of the input dataset.

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, "FindClosestPoint", "input dataset", "output dataset", "CutOff Distance"])
.NET using ETGWRun.exe	StartInfo.FileName = ETGWPath StartInfo.Arguments = "FindClosestPoint" "input dataset" "output dataset" "CutOff Distance"
.NET using ETGWOutX.dll	FindClosestPoint(input dataset, output dataset,CutOff Distance)
ArcPy	arcpy.FindClosestPoint(input dataset, output dataset,CutOff Distance)

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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