Selection in ARCGIS

Understanding Queries and selection

 Select features by Location
• The Select By Location tool lets you select
features based on their location relative to
features in another layer.
• There are variety of selection methods to
select the point, line, or polygon features in
one layer that are near or overlap the features
in the same or another layer.
 Select features by Location
 Select features from
a layer (or a set of layers)
that have a spatial relationship
with features from a source
layer.
• The Target layer is the layer in which
features are selected. The Source layer is
the layer whose features are used to
determine the selection based on its
spatial relationship to the target.
Select features by Location
 Select features by Location
• Intersect: Intersect returns any feature that either fully or
partially overlaps the source feature(s).

• Are within a distance of: This operator creates buffers using

the buffer distance around the source features and returns all
the features intersecting the buffer zones.
 Select features by Location
• Are within: To be selected, the geometry of the target feature
must fall inside the geometry of the source feature. Selected
features and source features can have overlapping
boundaries.

• Are completely within: To be selected, all parts of the target

features must fall inside the geometry of the source feature(s)
and cannot touch the source's boundaries.
 Select features by Location
• Contain: To be selected, the geometry of the source feature
must fall inside the geometry of the target feature including
its boundaries.

• Completely Contain: To be selected, all parts of the target

feature must completely contain the geometries of the source
feature. In addition, the source feature cannot touch or
overlap the target's boundaries. The target feature layer must
be a polygon.
 Select features by Location
• Have their Centroid in: A target feature is selected by this
operator if the centroid of its geometry falls into the geometry
of the source feature or on its boundaries.

• Share a line segment with: With this method, the source and
target features are considered as sharing a line segment if
their geometries have at least two contiguous vertices in
common. The source and target features must be either lines
or polygons
 Select features by Location
• Touch the Boundary of: An interior line or a polygon
completely contained within a polygon is selected if its
geometry shares line segments, vertices, or endpoints with
the polygon boundary.

• Are identical to: Two features are considered identical if their

geometries are strictly equal. The feature types must be the
same—for instance, you can use this operator to compare two
polygon layers, but comparing a point layer and a polygon
layer for identity always returns an empty selection.
 Select features by Location
• Are crossed by the outline of: For this operator, the
boundaries of the source and target feature must
have at least one edge, vertex, or endpoint in
common but must not share a line segment. The
source and target features must be either lines or
polygons.
 Select features by Attributes
• One of the selection methods you can use to
select features in a layer is to select features
using an attribute query. This is performed
using the Select By Attributes tool.
• Select By Attributes allows you to provide a
SQL query expression that is used to select
features that match the selection criteria
Select features by Attributes
Select features by Attributes