How to spatially join attributes of a polygon closest/nearest to a point in QGIS?

Question

this seems like it should be a simple task but so far I've not had any luck. I have a points shapefile (showing where manholes are on public roads), and a polygon shapefile showing where building foot prints are. I want to take the attributes of the closest building footprint polygon to a manhole point - using a nearest distance algorithm. Is there any simple way to achieve this in QGIS?

Answer 1

My suggestion is refFunctions plugin, which will add geomnearest() function to your Field Calculator.

Then open the attribute table of your manhole point layer and create a new field with an expression geomnearest('buildings', 'owner') (if the layer name of your buildings is buildings and you want to extract its owner field. (Please note the single quotation marks, not double).

It will take the owner field and add the information to your manhole point layer.

Answer 2

If you want a simple tool to do the task, you could consider the NNJoin plugin. For each feature in the input layer (point, line, polygon), it finds the closest feature in the join layer (point, line, polygon). The resulting layer will for each input feature contain the distance to the closest join feature in addition to all the attributes of the input feature and the join feature.