A PiP analysis determines which polygon (or polygons) a point falls within. Examples of PiP analyses are:
- Assigning sales territory for new customer records.
- Calculating which store trade areas contain the most overlap, by measuring the amount of customer overlap rather than area of overlap.
Spatial+ has the ability to buffer a line, point, or polygon. The area enclosed by the buffer is treated like a polygon, which can then be searched to determine if a point falls inside.
This document refers to buffered polygons as zones, buffered lines as corridors, and buffered points as circles. Collectively, all of these items are referred to as objects.
This allows you to determine if a point (or points) is within 500 feet of a shoreline, within 2 miles of a store, or within 1.3 miles of a sales territory.
The buffering is done during the actual test, and therefore is completely dynamic. The developer only needs to know if buffers will ever be used, not the actual size of the buffer.