Using dissolve on point features truncating the output attribute table?

[JillClogston]

Hi community!

I have a table of whale sightings data with dates, group IDs of the whales seen, coordinates, and many other fields. I need to do some analyses on different whale groups looking only at the days present in a geographic region rather than each sighting of a group - some whale groups will split during the day and will be counted as two different sightings, but we only want to count those as one (hopefully that makes sense!). 

I tried to use the dissolve tool which ran fine, but the resulting attribute table contains only 3 or 4 of the fields from the original attribute table which has 31 fields. I would like to retain all fields. I've tried the Pairwise dissolve as well with the same result.  How can I accomplish my goal without losing fields?

Thoughts?

Thank you!
Jill

[GeeteshSingh07 · Accepted solution]

Hi @JillClogston , I have been facing this issue as well....Dissolve tool doesn't retain all fields, it only retains default fields, dissolve fields and statistics fields.

My workaround to get all my fields in my output feature class is joining the original table to new table.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/data-management/join-field.htm

[MichaelVolz]

This is the technique I use at my org as well after using the Dissolve tool.  This is especially important when you need to keep the schema intact.

[JillClogston]

Ahh, thank you. Will give that a go!

Jill

[JillClogston]

@GeeteshSingh07 @MichaelVolz As I try to join my dissolved table to the original table, I have no common field between them. I want to create a new field in each table that is a combination of the group ID (text and numbers) with the date field. How would I use the Calculate field tool to combine these two? Or, is there an easier way that I'm overlooking?

[JillClogston]

Ah, I think I've got it. This seemed to do the trick!:

[GeeteshSingh07]

That’s great. 
If we don’t have any common field, in that case, we can also use “Spatial Join”. 

@JillClogston