Can a spatial View in ArcSDE be viewed in ArcCatalog?

Question

Can a spatial view in ArcSDE created by "sdetable create view" command be viewed as feature class in ArcCatalog, or is it just another plain table?

I have a feature class table and an attribute table (non spatial) stored in ArcSDE database. They can be related by a command column. I plan to create a spatial view in ArcSDE joining those tables and also publish the view as a feature service in ArcGIS Server. Is it possible? And, if the view can be published as a feature service, can feature operations such as Add, Edit and Delete Features be applied to all the view fields?

Answer 1

It is possible to join the tables. Suppose your tables are named Locations{ObjecId, Shape, LocationName} and Offenders(Id, FirstName, LastName, CrimeLocation) . Follow the following steps to create the featue view:

1. On the computer running SDE run the following command

sdetable -o create_view -T PersonsOfInterest -t SpatialDB.SchemaName.Locations -c SpatialDB.SchemaName.Locations.Shape,SpatialDB.SchemaName.Locations.ObjectId -i sde:sqlserver:SERVERNAME -D SpatialDB -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD

1. Using SQL Server Management studio, open the new view and edit it to read :

ALTER VIEW PersonsOfInterest SELECT o.id as ObjectId, o.CrimeLocation, o.FirstName, o.LastName, loc.shape FROM SchemaName.Offenders o INNER JOIN SchemaName.Locations l ON o.LocationName = l.LocationName

Note that we changed the view so that the ObjectID column is read from the business table. If you do not set this column correctly, your view will not show the right number of records.