Join/Relate Work Order Data to Feature layer

Question

Hello, I have been tasked to analyze our work order data so that we can identify trends. I have a gdb that includes shapefiles for all facilities and a xlsx that has all work orders for the last year with a column for facility number (with many work orders per facility).

How do I join/relate this table to the shapefile such that I can do hotspot analysis/work orders by type/work orders by priority etc?

Thanks!

BB1234 · Answer

It sounds like your data has a one-to-many relationship.

Arcmap only supported one-to-one joins. But ArcGIS Pro supports one-to-many joins in some cases. In Pro, it will display duplicate rows in the attribute table for each of the workorders on the "many" side.

But one-to-many joins only happen under specific circumstances. The short way of describing it is: if all your data is in the same geodatabase, then Pro will likely create a one-to-many join. But if some of your data is in Excel, then that means all of your data isn't in a single geodatabase, so the join won't be one-to-many, it will be one-to-one (one-to-first).

You might find it hard to decipher the documentation when it comes to why Pro chooses to create a one-to-many vs one-to-one join: Add Join (Data Management). Hint: search that page in your browser for the word "many".
This post might help make sense of why Pro made a one-to-many vs one-to-one join: Indicate what caused type of join to be used (1:1 vs 1:M)

But regardless, Pro will tell you what kind of join it used in the layer properties:

Just a heads up: One-to-many joins in ArcGIS Pro are quite buggy. You might find you need to export to a static copy (such as a separate feature class within the same geodatabase) in order to use the joined data in Pro.

* Is ArcGIS Pro the right tool for tabular/join-based geodatabase analysis?
* Disallow 1:M join layers as GP inputs instead of producing unexpected results

BB1234 · Answer

For what it's worth, your blurb where you say "I have a gdb that includes shapefiles" doesn't really make sense. Data is either in a geodatabase, or a shapefile, but not both.

A geodatabase's layers are called feature classes, not shapefiles.

GarrettStanley · Answer

Will a join work if I have multiple work orders associated with each building number? Every time in the past that I have done a join, it simply adds the data from the other table as additional columns. In this case, I have multiple columns and rows associated with each building number.