Update a field attribute in one column based on a change to another column in one table

Question

When editing I want to be able to change the attributes of one field and upon doing this allow for the automatic update of another field in the same attribute table. Essentially I have one layer with a code, description and legend information. I would like to be able to edit the code and have the description and the legend information update with this edit with its correct description and legend information. Is there any way to do this within ArcMap's tools or an associated script? Thanks,

Answer 1

You could also try making a relationship table if you are working out of a geodatabase. See the link below:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//004t00000006000000.htm

Answer 2

You could create a simple python field calculator script that you run to update the description field values when you are done with your edits, see example below:

def checkValue(c,d):
  if c == 1:
    return 'one'
  if c == 2:
    return 'two'
  if c == 3:
    return 'three'
  if c == 4:
    return 'four'

Answer 3

What kind of spatial database are you working with? A shapefile? Personal or File Geodatabase? ArcSDE?

If you are working with an SDE database on traditional RDBMS (MS SQL, ORACLE, Postgres) you could use a database trigger to help automatically update fields when a change is made to another.

If you are working with a shapefile or pgdb/fgdb, you won't have this option as triggers are not supported in their database structures.