Joining ArcGIS table with feature class many-to-one to create new feature class?

Question

I am using ArcGIS Desktop 10.2.2.

I have a file geodatabase with two files, a table and a feature class with point geometry.

• The feature class contains transit stops with the stop number and the geography of each stop
• The table contains boardings per trip per day at each stop, with time and date information for each record.

This is obviously a many-to-one relationship, because there's only a few hundred stops but hundreds of boarding records at each stop. What I would like to do is join the table to the feature class so that I end up with a feature class with each boarding record linked with the relevant geography for the stop. (My goal is to produce a time series animation showing boardings over time.) However, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to join geographic data to a table and transform that into a feature class.

Do I need to do a more complex workaround?

I do have the lat-long data, so I could just create a feature class from the table using that data, but isn't there an automatic way to do it that doesn't force me to re-create geographic data?

I'm using ArcGIS 10.2.2 Basic on Windows 7.

• Michael Stimson: You are wanting a 'relate' resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//…, joins are always one-to-one. If Relates are too complex then consider joining boardings to transit stops and summarizing that table based on transit stop OBJECTID then join to that table..
• Mapperz: for 10.3 users help is now at desktop.arcgis.com/en/desktop/latest/manage-data/tables/…

Answer 1

You can use [Make Query Table] Tool in ArcToolBox:

1. Add feature class and table to the input table.
2. Select the required field in the field list(eg.table.trip,table.datetime...),Most important point is you must select your featrue class's shape field too. If you forget it,the result be a TableView Instead of a layer.
3. set join Conditions SQL.

After tool execution,You can find a temporary layer in the ArcMap TOC windows.It should that contains the shapes of each datetime.You can export layer to save it to feature class.

• Geoff Green: Thank you, that did it. Very much appreciate the help. I had looked into using "Make Query Layer," but that's not available for use with non-RDBMS tables. The only gotcha, which I'll leave here in case anyone runs into this problem, is that the quotes need to be taken out of the SQL expression that's used for the joining, regardless of what the documentation might indicate.