View and modify relationship properties

Available with Standard or Advanced license.

Once you create a relationship class, it appears in the Catalog pane, and you can inspect the properties of the relationship class and the feature classes that participate in it.

Use these steps to access the Relationship Class Properties dialog box to review the properties defined for a relationship class:

  1. Start ArcGIS Pro.
  2. In the Catalog pane, in the Databases folder, click the geodatabase connection to expand its contents.
  3. Right-click the relationship class and select Properties.

    Relationship class expanded in the Catalog pane.

On the General tab, the following relationship class properties are displayed:

Relationship class properties
  • Relationship Class—The name of the relationship class.
  • Type—The type of relationship class, Simple or Composite.
  • Cardinality— A relationship's cardinality specifies the number of objects in the origin class that can relate to a number of objects in the destination class. A relationship can have one of three cardinalities: One-to-one, One-to-many, Many-to-many.
  • Notification—The message notification direction. This is applicable if you want to implement custom cascade update or delete behavior in which there may be actions that require an update of one feature to trigger an update in its related features. Updates can be required in one direction or the other, both, or none.
  • Origin Name—The name of the origin class.

  • Origin Primary Key—The key field in the origin class of a relationship is called the primary key and is often abbreviated as PK.

  • Origin Foreign Key—The key field in the destination class is called the foreign key and is often abbreviated as FK.

  • Destination Name—The name of the destination class.

  • Forward Path Label—A forward label that appears when you navigate from the origin to the destination. This label can be modified directly on this dialog box.

  • Backward Path Label—A backward label that appears when you navigate from the destination to the origin. This label can be modified directly on this dialog box.

  • Split Policy—The relationship class split policy is used to determine how records in the related destination table are treated when a feature in the origin feature class is split during the editing process.

The Rules tab on the Relationship Class Properties dialog box lists all the possible rules that can exist for your relationship class.

See Relationship rules for details about enabling and disabling rules on your relationship class.

The Rules tab is accessible from the Relationship Class Properties dialog box.

The Editor Tracking tab on the Relationship Class Properties dialog box is visible when you view the properties of a M:N (Many-to-many) or attributed 1:1 (One-to-one) or 1:M (One-to-many) table-based relationship class.

The Editor Tracking tab allows you to enable and disable editor tracking to automatically record and maintain information about inserts and updates that are made on an attributed relationship class table also known as an intermediate table.

For example, a M:N relationship class between a Parcels feature class and a ParcelOwners table was created in which a parcel may have many owners and a parcel owner may own many parcels. In this scenario, other attributes can be stored in this intermediate table that describe the relationship itself, such as the PercentOwnership field which stores the precent ownership for each relationship between the owners and parcels. Enabling editor tracking on this intermediate table automatically records and maintains inserts or updates made to this attributed relationship class table.

See Editor tracking for details about enabling and disabling editor tracking.

The Editor Tracking tab is accessible from the Relationship Class Properties dialog box