How to copy attributes after splitting polylines?

Question

I have two almost identical shapefiles (polylines) representing a road network. The only difference is that the original shapefile has lines that have different lengths, while the other shapefile has a set length of 1000 meter.

While creating the equal sections of 1000 meters, the attribute table of the original shapefile with different lengths was lost. This also means that the new shapefile contains more Objects than the original shapefile.

Is there a way to copy the attributes from the original shapefile to the new shapefile? The attributes from the original need to be copied to all the objects that are at the same location in the new shapefile.

The first picture contains the original layer with classification as Major Road (please note, between two intersections there is only 1 object, unlike in the new layer). The second picture contains the new layer without classification and the third one contains the picture when using spatial join in ArcGis.

Answer 1

The workflow suggested will work as long as the relationship between the two later is 1:n (or 1:1), namely that each line in the original shape corresponds to 1 or more lines in the 1000 meters layer, but not vice versa (i.e. not n:n).

I demonstrate the workflow on arcgis, but it will work for qgis as well.

Prior to this answer, I've suggested a spatial join, that didn't work for the OP. In addition it didn't work well for QGIS. Thus, here is a work around this problem using a mediating layer of line centroids (midpoints)

• Create a point layer in which each point is a centorid / midpoint of one line from your 1000 meters layer. I've used Feature vertices to points, with MID as the vertex I want.
• Than I've performed a spatial join; joining attributes from the original lines layer to the points. The definitions used in the join menu are shown below.

• Finally I've used join by attributes on the 1000 meter lines with the points, matching FID (1000 meter line) to ORIG_FID (Midpoint layer).

That should solve the problem.

For Qgis you can use geomToWKT( centroid( $geometry ) ) in field calculator the get a WKT string of the centroid, taken from here, and work from there to create your mid point layer.