First of all, we want a geodatabase to work with. Create a new folder in your root drive c:\ArcGISByExample\. In the supporting files for this chapter, copy the B04847_01_Files folder to the C:\ArcGISbyExample folder.

From the Start menu, locate and run ArcCatalog 10.3 (or your version of ArcCatalog). It is the one with the cabinet icon.

From the Catalog Tree window, right-click on Folder Connections and click on Connect To Folder. This will establish a connection with the folder that contains the geodatabase.

From the Connect To Folder dialog, browse and select the C:\ArcGISbyExample folder and click on OK, as illustrated in the next screenshot. Note that if you don't see the Catalog Tree window, you can show it from the Windows menu in the toolbar.

You should see that the C:\ArcGISbyExample folder has been added to the Folder Connections folder. Use this folder to browse to C:\ArcGISByExample\B04847_01_Files\Geodatabase\Restaurants.gdb, as shown in the following screenshot:

Make sure that the Content tab is active. You should see the different objects that this geodatabase consists of. The first object is Food_and_Drinks, which is the feature class of some restaurants. The Food_and_Drinks object has a one-to-many relationship with VENUES_REVIEW which stores the reviews of a given restaurant.

You can view the content of the feature class by selecting it and clicking on Preview, as shown in the following screenshot. The default preview is Geography, which visually displays the points:

You can also display a tabular view by changing the Preview type to Table, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Go back to the Contents tab, from Catalog Tree, right-click on the Food_and_Drinks feature class and select Properties.

Activate the General tab and take a look at Alias Name, we can freely change this name without actually changing the physical feature class name for convenience reasons. The current Alias Name Food and Drinks Venues in Belize is quite long, so let us change it to Venues only. Click on Apply to save your changes.

Activate the Fields tab, which is the columns or attributes that this feature class consists of. Take note of the different data types for each field. Pay attention to the SHAPE field, which is created by default and the data type is Geometry.

Activate the Subtypes tab; here we can define multiple types for our feature class. In our case, we have five different restaurant types number coded.

Click on OK to close the feature class properties.

Close ArcCatalog.

From the Start menu, locate and run ArcMap 10.3 (or your version of ArcMap). It is the one with the map and lens icon.

If you are opening ArcMap for the first time, you will be prompted with the getting started dialog. Click on Cancel to work on the default document.

We want to work with our geodatabase on ArcMap. To do that, we need to add a feature class to the map.

From the Table of Content window, right-click on the Layers node and click on Add Data. This will open a dialog to select a geodatabase.

Since we established a folder in ArcCatalog, you should see it in Folder Connection under the Look In dropdown.

Browse to the Restaurants.gdb geodatabase, select the Food_and_Drinks feature class, and then click on Add, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

You will see that a new layer has been created under layers named Venues. This is the representation of the feature class. You can see that the name of the layer is actually the alias name of the feature class by default, which we have renamed in the The ArcGIS geodatabase section. ArcMap creates this layer wrapper to visual a feature class, change symbology, control labels, scaling, and so many other things.

Note that different symbologies have been assigned based on the restaurant subtypes that we have mentioned in the The ArcGIS geodatabase section. See the following screenshot:

We can change the symbology to make it more relevant; click on the point next to Bar to change its symbol. This will bring up the Symbol Selector. Type Bar in the search box and hit Enter. Select your favorite symbol and click on OK, as shown in the next screenshot:

You should see that the map has been refreshed with the new symbology, as shown in the next screenshot. You can see how rich you can make your map by using these built-in tools. Imagine what we can do if we could extend this to the next level, as we will see in the next chapter.

Close ArcMap and choose not to save your changes.