Please help me with this question about "Select by Location". I'm currently using ArcGis 9.3.1
I have multiple "Selector" polygons. Ideally, I would like to select a points shapefile with "Select by Location" using the selector polygon. Then I create a column in the attribute table and put a value of "1" in only the rows that are selected.
So the process is farily straightforward, except that I have about 30 selector polygons, so it's hard to repeat the process of select by location, create column, tag the rows that are selected, over and over.
I've tried to think of a few ways of doing this, but they don't seem to accomplish exactly what I might need. I could try a model in Modelbuilder, but my polygons are constantly changing, and I'm not sure of a way for Modelbuilder to grab all the latest polygons. Other way I thought was merging all the selector polygons into one shapefile, then maybe doing a spatial join? However I accomplish this, I really need separate columns for each selector polygon in the table, so the points file can show any overlapping polygons.
Best Answer
If you can't be productive enough by manually using your "selector" polygon (and calculating the selected rows of points to "1" in your new attribute fields) and Modelbuilder isn't flexible enough to meet your needs, then Python Arcgisscripting for (9.3) could definitely meet your goals. It depends on how long the manual repetitious method would take verses how long it would take to code using Esri's Arcgisscripting module for ArcGis Desktop 9.3.1.
If you're up to the challenge you might want to check out some of the ArcGis / Python forums for advice specifically with the Arcgisscripting Python Module.
Otherwise, it's likely someone with more Python experience than myself could give you a quick script (or invaluable hints). Good luck