Some enhancements that would make the Spatial Join tool more useful:
- Allow user to name the "join_count" field automatically generated by the tool. Currently if i want to perform several joins to the same target each creates a 'join_count' field, which ultimately has to get changed so its clear what data are being counted.
- Allow serial join operations, that is, allow multiple 'join feature' feature classes per target feature class. Sometimes I want to summarize/aggregate several layers to a single layer (such as county or census block), currently I have to do this one at a time or build a model to handle this.
- Make data summaries easier to specify. If i want to summarize a numeric attribute in a join feature I have to manually add a new field to the field map, specifiy the merge rule, then specify the input field. If I want Min, Max, and Average for just one field this means 9 operations I have to complete. We should be able pick all the desired summary statistics for a field just as we do with the Summarize tool when summarizing a table.
