Exercise Six - Ed's Answers

I'm going to be posting my answers to the exercises and I invite everyone to critique them and let me know if my answers differ from your own so we can discuss the differences until we have agreement on a final, correct answer.

• Q1:  What is the common ID for joining the "landuse" table with the "parcel" attribute table?
• I used the FID and OID as the common attribute between the two tables.
• Q2:  What is the common ID for relating the table "owners" with the "parcel" attribute table?
• I used the APN as the common attribute between the two tables.
• STEP 7:
• Select a record in table "owners.dbf", what do you see in the table "attributes of parcel.shp"?
• The record in "attributes of parcel.shp" matches the record in the table "owners.dbf".
• Select a record in the table "attributes of parcel.shp", what do you see in the table "owners.dbf"?
• The record in "owners.dbf" matches the record in the table "attributes of parcel.shp".
• Click on any parcel on the map and examine the result in the "Identify Results" dialog box.  What attribute information do you see in the [identify] dialog box?
• I see the attribute information contained in the "parcel.shp" table.
• Click on the ID shown in the dialog box so that the plus sign becomes a minus sign.  What attribute information do you see in the dialog box? (Click again to see the attributes in the related table.)
• I see the attribute information corresponding to the "owners.dbf" table.
• Reopen the attribute table of the "parcels.shp" layer.
• Select any record.
• Click the "Options" button in the "parcels.shp" table.
• Select "Relate Tables".
• Select "Relate1:owners"
• Examin the "owners" table.  What do you see?
• The highilghted record in the "owners" table has the same common attribute (APN) as the selected record in the "parcels.shp" table.
• What did you learn from this exercise?
• Joining tables simply appends the information from the source table to the destination table.
• Joining a tables can be done with tables of different dimensions (one to many or many to one relationship).
• Relating tables allows you to "drill down" into the details of a selected/identified feature.
• Relating tables can only be done on dimensionally similar tables (one to one relationship).