Question on Geodatabases - is this possible?

[KurtHerman-Roloff]

Hi all -

Here is my situation.  I am working for an organization that works in many countries.  In each of these countries are a variety of grantees that are funded.  Each grantee works in a different amount of administrative areas.

As of now, I have created shaprefiles for each grantee, based on the underlying administrative areas they work in.  ALL of the shapefiles have an identical table structure.

This is what I want (ideally) and was hoping that someone could confirm that it would be possible.

- Have all of the grantees (Feature Classes?) in the geodatabase, sorted by country (Feature Dataset?)

- Be able to query across all grantees (e.g. show me all of grantees created after 2000).

Is this possible and if so, what method would i use to create this?

[OwenEarley]

The hard part is going to be querying across the multiple feature classes in the geodatabase. All of the out of the box tools just query a single source.

This response to a question on GIS StackExchange might provide the solution - Model or Code to query all feature classes in geodatabase by selecting by attribute.

Alternatively, you could create one feature class containing all of your data and use definition queries to filter your data on country or grantee name, etc.

[GabrielUpchurch1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Kurt,

You could accomplish this in a geodatabase using one polygon feature class that contains all grantees.  The feature class would need a field that contains the grantee and the polygons could be either the entire area a grantee is responsible for or the individual administrative units.  Entire area would be a coarser level of geographic information while individual administrative units would be a finer level of information.  In either case, you just need to include the relevant attributes (fields), such as grantee, grantee creation date and administrative unit.  You could then just query the feature class whenever you needed specific information and use definition queries in map documents when you just wanted to display specific grantees.  Since all the shapefiles have an identical table structure, this should be a straightforward process.  If you need guidance on the actual steps to go from multiple shapefiles to a single feature class, just let me know.