Alternative Data Entry Methods for Geodatabase

TysonJohnston — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 14:10:21 GMT

We have about 30 people in multiple locations editing multiple geodatabases on a single Amazon EC2 server.
Each geodatabase has at least one feature service from which the users create a local copy for editing on the machines, make edits to the resulting file geodatabase, and then synchronize their edits.

Two of the geodatabases contain related tables that are used to store species lists. For example, a polygon feature class (we'll call it "sites") in a gdb may contain a site which a person visited, and that polygon feature class (sites) has a related table, "species list", which may contain 10, 20, 80, or 200 species found at the "site". Our users are very unsatisfied with the current workflow of creating the "site" feature, and then having to make 200 entries into the related table as follows:

in the attributes window, right click on the related table and choose "add new" for each species

search through a large domain (1000's of items) for the correct species - there is no autofill/autcomplete

I am seeking an alternative method to ease the entry of large species lists into the related table.

Some ideas are:

have a separate Access db that houses the species lists and can be loaded using a custom model builder tool into the related table

have an Excel spreadsheet template for creating the species lists and can be loaded using a custom model builder tool into the related table

some other interface or method

Users formerly used a combination of a shapefiles and an Access db to store the data. Having everything in the same place now is an improvement, but data entry is lousy in ArcMap compared to Access and its more "advanced" capabilities.

Any insight, suggestions or otherwise would be greatly appreciated!

topic Alternative Data Entry Methods for Geodatabase in Data Management Questions

Alternative Data Entry Methods for Geodatabase