Database Views vs Joins

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04-25-2017 06:38 AM
KevinDunlop
Occasional Contributor III

I wanted to share an issue with the community that we just worked thru.

After our open data site went live, one of our customers point out that all our field names in our parcels layer were wrong.  Instead of names like gpin, taxmapnumb, source, etc,  the name were gisdbvecto, gisdbvec_1, gisdbvec_2, and so on.  The funny thing was that the data tab in both ArcGIS Online and open data should the names correctly.  After working with ESRI support and doing some research, I found the problem was the join.  We had joined our ownership table to the parcels layer.  This caused the names to be gisdb.vector.gpin which was then truncated to gisdbvecto since of the character limit with shapefiles.

The solution to the problem was to create a database view instead of doing a join the mxd.  In a view, you can rename fields to anything you want which prevents extend name.  So if you are serving up your data with joins, you might want to check it (ie download it via open data and open it in ArcMap).  You might need to create a view instead.

Hope it helps.

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