Distance Join Tool
❖The Distance Join tool will do a join of two layers based on their distance from each other. In this example I’ll be doing a distance join on a Route and Points layer to see which points fall within 1KM of the route:
❖First select the layers in the layer control by clicking on one, then holding down shift and then down or up arrow so that both are selected (the layers will need to be next to each other):
The way the tool works is that the bottom layer is always taken as the baseline of comparison and will be the layer whose geometries will be included in the new joined layer created. In this case it is my Points layer. The tool will do a join based on how far the route is from each point.
❖Next click on the tool which will bring up the dialogue where you will specify the Distance. In this example I will just have Include within distance ticked on. Then click OK:
You are then prompted to set the properties for the new layer that will be created, when done click OK:
Your new layer has been created, as you can see it includes only those points that fall within 1 KM of my route:
If I go into its layer data I will see the join it did along with the distance of the route from each point (the baseline layer is by default left and the other layer is taken as right, in this case the route layer is right):
❖The other options you can use are to have Include all left or Include all right ticked on as well which will cause all elements of the left or right layer to be included in the new joined layer regardless of whether they fall within the distance or not, this allows you to see everything that does and doesn’t fall within the distance. In this example I will tick on Include all left which will cause all elements of my points layer to be included and will just give a null value to those that don’t fall within the distance I specified:
