Using File Geodatabase?

Question

I have spent all morning and most of the afternoon today trying to figure out how to work with the geodatabase tool. I need to record 3D information on a 2D plane, and I think this is the way to go about it, however I'm having difficulty.

I am doing I.T. work on network closets at the institution I work at. Each closet has several racks. Each rack has several panels. Each panel has multiple fields of information I need to record; Cable Range, Color, Cable Type, Cable Destination, etc. I could create a shapefile for each panel and then tie that to an excel doc with all of the included data, but that would be tedious and take up a lot of memory space.

Ideally I would have a single point for each rack, which is then tied to data that contains information about the contents of each panel on that rack.

What's the best way to record all of this data?

Answer 1

First, I think there may be some confusion between shapefiles and file geodatabases. You may want to have a look at this post.

Then, you can create a point feature class for your racks. The rack feature class will have some sort of rack ID attribute. This will be some unique identifier for each rack. It may also have an attribute which identifies which closet it is in. Or you can have a polygon representing the closet.

You can then create a table for your panels. This table will have all the attributes you specified plus the ID for the rack that it is in.

The next step is to create a relationship class that links your panels to your racks. When this has been done, whenever you click on the information tool for your rack, you can get a list of all the panels that are associated with it. Here is more information about relationship classes.