Rename a SpatialPolygon class object in R

Question

I am completely new to GIS but am quite familar with R. I was able to dissolve some zip codes into a larger sales territory.

For reference, my previous question is located here.

However, because I will be doing this for 304 sales markets across the US, I will need to be able to give each a name in order to merge on my sales data after the fact. I am assuming this can be done by accessing the ID slot in the object.

I am trying to access the ID slot. The following code does not work:

tmp2@polygons@Polygons@ID

Results in the following error:

Error: trying to get slot "Polygons" from an object of a basic class ("list") with no slots

Sorry for the long post, but here is my structure. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

An object of class "SpatialPolygons"
Slot "polygons":
[[1]]
An object of class "Polygons"
Slot "Polygons":
[[1]]
An object of class "Polygon"
Slot "labpt":
[1] -71.57027  41.85902

Slot "area":
[1] 0.1317919

Slot "hole":
[1] FALSE

Slot "ringDir":
[1] 1

Slot "coords":
               x        y
  [1,] -71.50031 41.68146
  [2,] -71.49977 41.67378
  [3,] -71.49942 41.66667
  [4,] -71.51520 41.66557
  [5,] -71.52351 41.66233
  [6,] -71.52396 41.66257
  [7,] -71.52686 41.66166
  [8,] -71.52693 41.66192
  [9,] -71.53344 41.66194
 [10,] -71.53336 41.66227
 [11,] -71.53302 41.66798
 [12,] -71.53346 41.66943
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 [14,] -71.53506 41.66911
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 [16,] -71.53382 41.67065
 [17,] -71.53287 41.67143
 [18,] -71.53369 41.67211
 [19,] -71.53256 41.67314
 [20,] -71.53284 41.67978
 [21,] -71.53262 41.68029
 [22,] -71.53201 41.68061
 [23,] -71.53342 41.68218
 [24,] -71.53287 41.68275
 [25,] -71.53351 41.68434
 [26,] -71.53293 41.68442
 [27,] -71.53246 41.68836
 [28,] -71.53329 41.68855
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[783,] -71.45784 41.67210
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[785,] -71.46689 41.66987
[786,] -71.46871 41.67024
[787,] -71.47862 41.67031
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[789,] -71.47718 41.67402
[790,] -71.47734 41.68254
[791,] -71.50031 41.68146



Slot "plotOrder":
[1] 1

Slot "labpt":
[1] -71.57027  41.85902

Slot "ID":
[1] "TRUE"

Slot "area":
[1] 0.1317919



Slot "plotOrder":
[1] 1

Slot "bbox":
        min       max
x -71.79924 -71.32046
y  41.66166  42.01880

Slot "proj4string":
CRS arguments: NA 

Answer 1

You are not accessing the slot correctly. You could try sapply to iterate through the polygon ID slot to apply a function.

sapply(slot(tmp2, "polygons"), function(i) slot(i, "ID"))

I would be very cautions in attempting to change only the polygon ID. This ID is occurs through all slots as a common link. For example, the rownames of the data slot share this ID. To effectively do what you explained in this post you would have to figure out all of the slot ID's that need to be changed. If you want to simply dissolve your features you can use the gUnionCascaded in the rgeos package.

I think that your problem may be that you are not retaining an ID link to crosswalk back to your data. Here is an example of dissolving on an attribute contained in your data. If you need to intersect with another sp dataset to retrieve the values that you can dissolve on you can use the over function in sp. In the below example I am using the maptools package for access to the built-in "wrld_simpl" dataset to use as an example. The id argument in the gUnionCascaded function retains the associated values in the resulting SpatialPolygons object. Once dissolved, this object needs to be coerced into a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object so there is an associated dataframe. The ordering of the "id" vector is taken care of internally in the function which is why you extract these values from the SpatialPolygons object. This should provide you with an ID that you can join your data on. Please be aware that you cannot use merge on a sp object. The merge function resorts the dataframe in the data slot. In doing this it breaks the rownames. An alternative is to use match. I often use a syntax like this:

spdata@data=data.frame(spdata@data, newdata[match(rownames(spdata@data), newdata$ID),])

where; spdata is your sp object and newdata is the dataframe that you want to join to the data slot in spdata.

# ADD REQUIRED PACKAGES
require(sp)
require(rgeos)
require(maptools)

# USE DATA FROM maptools PACKAGE
data(wrld_simpl)
  str(wrld_simpl@data)

# DISSOLVE BASED ON "REGION" COLUMN USING rgeos::gUnionCascaded 
regions <- gUnionCascaded(wrld_simpl, id=wrld_simpl@data$REGION)

# CREATE A DATAFRAME OF VALUES RETAINED FROM "REGION" COLUMN
( sdf <- data.frame(ID=row.names(regions)) )

# ASSIGN "REGION" VALUES TO rownames SO DATA MATCHES slots CORRECTLY
row.names(sdf) <- row.names(regions)

# CREATE A SpatialPolygonsDataFrame OBJECT WITH A data slot HOLDING REGION IDS.  
regions <-  SpatialPolygonsDataFrame(regions, sdf) 

# PLOT RESULTS   
par(mfrow=c(2,1))
  plot(wrld_simpl)
  plot(regions)

Answer 2

To do what you're trying to do, you need something like this:

tmp2@polygons[[1]]@ID

However, you might want to describe the data setup in a little more depth - it appears there's only one polygon in the SpatialPolygons object, so giving it an id isn't really going to help much. And if you're importing from a shapefile, for instance, it might make more sense to use a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame.