Remove inner polygons postgis

Question

I'm trying to remove inner polygons with postgis. I've created a routine, that resumes in:

From a polygon table, with a unique id:

• Create a linestring table from polygon
• Import to postgis
• Get the length of each line

Now I have a table with, for example, 5 linestrings for each id, each linestring was a polygon, and I want to get ONLY the longest line from each ID.

For this, I have a select, but I don't know how to group the geometry, to get ONLY the longest line

select  id, geom as length from esp_lines group by id

I have to group it by another field, but I don't know which one.

The other solution I've found is:

select  id, max(geom) as length from esp_lines group by id

but max(geom) doesn't give me the expected result (the longest linestring)

Does anybody know if is there any function to get the longest linestring of a group?

Answer 1

You are looking for Exterior ring

SELECT gid, ST_ExteriorRing(the_geom) AS ering
FROM sometable;

Answer 2

The ST_ExteriorRing returns a linestring. Use ST_MakePolygon to return a polygon that represents the original polygon with the donut holes removed.

SELECT gid, ST_MakePolygon(ST_ExteriorRing(the_geom)) AS ering
FROM sometable;

https://postgis.net/docs/ST_MakePolygon.html

Also be careful that sometable does not contain Multipolygons. https://postgis.net/docs/ST_ExteriorRing.html