Content Component 26.3
Content Component Help

# DISTCARTESIAN

The `DISTCARTESIAN` field specifier allows you to find documents that define a location that is within a specified distance from a specified point.

You can specify the document location using either a pair of fields (corresponding to X and Y coordinates), or a unified GeospatialType field that contains a supported geometric shape in Well-Known Text format.

TIP: If your document location field contains any shape other than a point, Knowledge Discovery calculates distances from the geometric center of the shape.

## Format

    FieldText=DISTCARTESIAN{coordX,coordY,dist}:POSITION

`coordX` | The specified x coordinate.
`coordY` | The specified y coordinate.
`dist` | The distance in units from the specified x/y coordinates.
`POSITION` | The document field or fields that contain the position value. You can use one of the following options to specify location fields: a single field. This field must contain a supported well-known text geometric object. See Supported Well-Known Text Geometric Objects. two fields, in the format `X:Y`, where `X` is the field that contains the x coordinate, and `Y` is the field that contains the y coordinate. You must specify the fields in the order `x:y`. You can specify multiple options for the location fields, in the form `POSITION1:POSITION2:POSITION3`, and so on. This form can include a mix of types (unified location fields and split X and Y coordinate fields). NOTE: If you use multiple position fields or field pairs, Content Component cannot match documents where a pair of split geospatial fields occurs interleaved with other geospatial fields. For example, if you use `X1:Y1:POSITION` in your query, and these fields occur in a document in the order `X1`, `POSITION`, `Y1`, Content Component does not match that document. In such cases, you can rewrite the query, in the form `DISTCARTESIAN{...}:X1:Y1 OR DISTCARTESIAN{...}:POSITION`

NOTE: You can optimize this field specifier by configuring your coordinate fields with the GeospatialType or NumericType property types. If you want to use a single field with well-known text definitions, you can optimize the field specifier only by using the unified GeospatialType property.

## Examples

    FieldText=DISTCARTESIAN{10,11,5}:X:Y

This example matches all documents whose (X,Y) position is within a distance of 5 units of the point (10,11). The position of a document in this example is contained in the fields `X` and `Y`.

    FieldText=DISTCARTESIAN{10,11,5}:POSITION:X:Y

This example matches all documents whose (X,Y) position is within a distance of 5 units of the point (10,11). The position of a document in this example is contained in either the (unified) `POSITION` field, or the separate `X` and `Y` fields.

Copyright 2026 Open Text
Version 26.3 | Last updated July 2026

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Product: Knowledge Discovery Content Component 26.3

Topic Title: DISTCARTESIAN