Feature to Point

Available in real-time and big data analytics.

The Feature to Point tool   is used to dynamically produce a point from an input feature multipoint, polyline, polygon, or envelope geometry. The tool returns points generated from the centroids of the input features or placed within the input features.

Examples

The following are example use cases for the tool:

• Calculate the centroid of a polygon feature to show the center of mass in real time. For example, a polygon feature representing a live hurricane can be reduced to a point centroid to show the generalized eye of the storm.
• Reduce multipoint, polyline, polygon, or envelope features to a point to improve event record throughput and storage performance. Polygon or polyline features with thousands of vertices can impact the performance of real-time analytics in ArcGIS Velocity.

Usage note

When working with the  Feature to Point tool, the attributes of the input features are maintained in the output layer.

Parameter

The parameter for the  Feature to Point tool is described in the table below.

Parameter	Description	Data type
Point should be inside parent feature	Specifies whether an output point is located within the input feature or at the centroid of the input feature. Unchecked—The output point is located at the centroid of the input feature. The output point may not be contained by the input feature. This is the default. Checked—The output point is located within the input feature. If the Point should be inside parent feature parameter is not checked, the location of each output point is determined as follows: Multipoint features—The output point is located at the average x-coordinate and y-coordinate of all the points in the multipoint. Polyline features—The output point is located at the weighted average x-coordinate and y-coordinate of the midpoints of all line segments in the line where the weight of a particular midpoint is the length of the correspondent line segment. Parametric (true) curves are densified. Polygon features—The output point is located at the center of gravity (centroid) of the polygon. Envelope—The output point is located at the center of gravity (centroid) of the envelope. If  the Point should be inside parent feature parameter is checked, the location of the representative point of an input feature is contained by the input feature and determined as follows: Multipoint features—The output point coincides with one of the points in the multipoint. Polyline features—The output point is on the line. If the line is a parametric (true) curve, the output point is at the midpoint of the line. Polygon features—The output point is inside the polygon. Envelope—The output point is inside the envelope.	Boolean

Consideration and limitation

The Feature to Point tool supports multipoint, polyline, polygon, and envelope geometry types as inputs. Point and tabular data are not supported.

Output layer

The Feature to Point tool output is a single part point feature layer that has all the attributes of the input features.