I will try to best explain what I want as a final product as maybe joining is not even needed.
I am working on a project for my university trying to map the locations of alumni. This map is to be published on a website and I plan on using ArcServer to do so. I have a dBASE table that has information about each alumni (excluding names for the sake of confidentiality) including items such as city, state, zip, year of graduation, college of graduation (examples- College of Letters and Science, College of Natural Resources, etc) and possibly more. The plan is to map by the first 3 digits of the zip code because that way the graduated color map I plan on displaying does not contain too many small shapes but at the same time allows for one to see where alumni are living now. I have a shapefile of the polygons of the first 3 digits of the zip code from the US Census. I am trying to build a model so that at the end of each semester someone can run the model with a new complete dBASE table and essentially update the map with the most current locations of alumni. I am working with some test records that I made up so that I can try to develop the model while the Alumni Database is cleaned up. What I want to be able to allow the viewer to do is choose the combinations of attributes that display on the map. For example: view graduated colors varying by the number of alumni in a zip3 area, or change to something like view graduated colors varying by the number of alumni in a zip3 area only for a certain year or college or combination of the two.
My question is: What is the best way to be able to display this on the map?
A few ideas running around my head and their problems: Creating a shapefile containing all zip3 areas for each possible combination that a person would search for so that they would just turn that layer on or off. This is a problem because with well over 100 years of graduation dates and multiple colleges (not to mention if they decide to add in another field such as location before coming to the university) the number of shapefiles that would be created would be huge not to mention the model would as well.
Another idea: creating a field in one zip3 shape file for each combination and populating that with the count and then doing something like a query to show only the search paramaters that the viewer wants to see. This could be a problem because again with all the different combinations there would be a huge amount of different fields in the shape file and again would be a giant model. Unless there is a short way to do this with few tools. The only thing I am coming up with would be a seperate process to frequency every combination and then join to the zip3.
The last idea is more of a question: If the two files stay seperate is it possible to have some sort of query in an ArcServer application that would be able to search in the dBASE for a particular combination and then use the zip3 field in that table to join to the zip3 field in the shapefile and change the display?
Another note: With the little bit of looking into ArcServer I have done I think I want to do this with Flex, as from what I saw from some live example sites, there are a couple sites that look like the output I want. I just don't know what form their data is in: multiple shape files, multiple fields, seperate files, etc.
Thank you for pushing through this long thread and I appreciate any comments or ideas that you provide.
