Spatial Join unique values for closest target feature

Question

I have a polygon shapefile of land plots with their corresponding cadaster number and a point shapefile with a water meters for each lot.

What I'm trying to do is to join the cadaster number from the polygon shapefile to its corresponding water meter. For this I'm using a spatial join with the point file (water meters) as my target feature and the polygon file (land plots) as the join feature and CLOSEST as the match method.

The problem is that the water meters and the land plots do not allign correctly as shown in the figure below and it's adding the same cadaster number to two different water meters.

Is there a way I can tell the program to assign a cadaster number only once and if a second point has this same polygon as the closest one to move on to the second closest?

I have some experience with python so if there is a way to do it this way it won't be a problem.

The drawing attached is just a simple example, what I actually have is this problem for a whole city so I can't just move the water meters manually.

Answer 1

[using QGIS, but I am sure there are equivalent tools in ArcGIS)

In that case you can try the Distance to nearest hub tool that you can find under the Processing Toolbox of QGIS. This tool will give you lines containing the attributes of your counters (i.e the hubs) and the ids of the nearest plots/houses. You can then join this attribute table to the table of your plots layer. I include a screenshot.

Of course this will only work if the data you have is 'regular' as the sample you depict, there are cases for which it might fail (having more counters than parcels or or having a parcel whose counter is actually closer to some other parcel).

Answer 2

I suppose in the attribute table of the counters there is no field saying to what parcel is the counter associated? That would make your life much easier - a simple join by attribute.