arcgis-desktoparcpydistancepolygon
I have a point feature class and a polygon feature class, and each point is located within one polygon. Is there a way to programmatically calculate the distance from each point to the farthest location on its containing polygon's edge (see example below)?
I have an ArcGIS Desktop basic licence.
Integration is done by summing the values and multiplying the common cell area (equal to the square of the cellsize).
Here is an example region to illustrate.
Create the Euclidean distance grid to the complement of the polygons. To do this, convert the polygons to raster format. This will place NoData values at all cells outside the polygons. Use IsNull and SetNull to place NoData only at cells inside the polygons. The compute the Euclidean distance grid of that. When hillshaded it should look something like this, with peaks inside each polygon and "ridges" extending along their "skeletons":
Use math operations, such as those offered in the Raster Calculator, to compute the values of N. In the formula, "x" is the Euclidean distance grid and A..D are constants. Here is a picture of the resulting grid, in pseudo 3D perspective:
Using the original polygon grid as the zone grid, compute the zonal sum of the result of (2). It will be a table with one number for each grid. Multiply those numbers by the square of the zone grid's cell size: those are the desired values.
I would approach this as follows:
Convert your polygons into lines (by which each edge of the polygons - a line between the consequent vertices - will become a line feature in the output feature class.) After the conversion, the output lines will preserve their "parent" polygon ID. Use GP tool: Feature To Line.
Take each point and then find out which line feature is the closest. By finding out this and the distance, you will be able to join points to the polygons thereafter based on the source polygon ID. This will tell to what source polygon each point has min distance (if needed). Use GP tool: Near.
In this example, I am finding to which parcel every water fitting is closest to:
Best Answer
As you have specified that the line from the point can pass in/out of the polygon then I think all you need to do is extract the Envelope of the polygon. You also state in the comment above you are look for an arcpy solution and you have a Basic license level.
You can get most of the way with model builder and a sneaky use of the fishnet tool to extract the Envelope. You could take that logic and convert it into a python script.
The image below was created by:
At this point you need to be using arcpy and cursors to cycle through the points and extracting the distance. What you want to look at is the method DistanceTo. So it's all achievable with the basic license level.