An overview of creating and maintaining relationship classes

This topic applies to ArcGIS for Desktop Standard and ArcGIS for Desktop Advanced only.

Creating relationship classes

Before you can create a relationship, you must have a primary key field in the origin and a foreign key field in the destination.

Once you have the primary and foreign key fields defined, you can use one of the following three tools to create a relationship class:

If both the origin and destination classes exist in the same feature dataset, the relationship class will be located in that feature dataset. Otherwise, the relationship class will be located directly under the geodatabase.

Creating a relationship can involve several additional steps, and there are different workflows you can follow to complete the process. The workflow you should follow depends on the data you have and the type of relationship you want to create.

Building and maintaining the relationship

ArcMap contains tools that help you build and maintain a relationship.

Related Topics

2/10/2012