Clip polygons with other polygons based on matching attributes

Question

I have two shapefiles, one which contains event locations and the the other of which represents regions where events take place.

• Events polygons with year and region_name attributes
• Regions polygons, which also have year and region_name attributes

The Event polygons sometimes extend beyond their proper Region. Regions sometimes change boundaries, which is why they also have a year attribute. I would like to clip each Event polygon using the appropriate Region polygon, i.e. the one with matching year and region_name attributes. Here is an image I made to illustrate the basic idea:

Some solutions I've tried but which have been unsatisfactory:

• Doing it manually (selecting each event and region by hand and clipping them), which seems unnecessarily tedious
• Using Select By Location to isolate the Events in each Region, which still requires working with each selection manually
• Using Intersect, which 1) leaves lots of event "remnants" outside their proper regions and 2) "oversplits" by dividing all Event polygons by all Region polygons, regardless of year

Note: I use both QGIS 1.8 and ArcMap 10.1. I can't install extensions for ArcGIS (I don't have administrative access) but I can use Python scripts.

Answer 1

In ArcMap, you could use python to run nested search cursors. For example:

arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management("region shapefile location", "Regions")
arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management("event shapefile location", "Events")

out_features = "name and location for output clips"
out_count = 0

r_rows = arcpy.SearchCursor(Regions)
for r_row in r_rows:
  r_name = r_row.region_name
  r_year = r_row.year
  e_rows = arcpy.SearchCursor(Events)
  for e_row in e_rows:
    e_name = e_row.region_name
    e_year = e_row.year
    if r_name == e_name and r_year == e_year:
      out_count += 1
      out_features = out_features + str(out_count)
      query = "\"region_name\" = '" + r_name + "'"
      arcpy.SelectLayerByAttribute_management(Regions, "", query)
      arcpy.SelectLayerByAttribute_management(Events, "ADD_TO_SELECTION", query)
      arcpy.Clip_analysis(Events, Regions, out_features)
  del e_row, e_rows
del r_row, r_rows

Answer 2

You could also do this in ArcMap using ModelBuilder.

String together these tools:

• Iterate Feature Selection - Use Region Name and Year as Group Fields
• Calculate Value - Calculate the expression to use to select an event (arcpy snippet) - Feed the expression into the select tool
• Select - For each iteration, it selects the events that correspond to the region/year combo
• Clip - Clips the Events by Region based on Region Name/Year combination
• Delete - Deletes the temporary select feature after the model executes.