First of all I'm completely new to the realm of GIS and ArcGIS.
Basically I need a reliable way to determine a donut hole's containing donut for a few hundred thousand polygons (where the donut holes are their own polygons in the same feature).
I've come across this question which deals with finding polygons within polygons; however, I need to actually map the internal polygon to its containing polygon (i.e. join the "lake" polygon's attributes to its "island" polygon).
ArcGIS's Spatial Join tool with JOIN_ONE_TO_MANY and COMPLETELY_CONTAINS options looks very promising but doesn't seem to work as expected. I'm guessing this is because the "lake" polygons don't actually overlap the "island" polygons; the holes are cut out of the containing polygons.
Is this possible? I'm using ArcGIS 10.