About creating event tables in ArcCatalog

You can create geodatabase, dBASE, and INFO event tables in ArcCatalog with easy-to-use table designers.

For a table to be considered an event table, it must contain a field that identifies the route and the appropriate route location fields. Point event tables require a single measure field. Line events require both from- and to-measure fields. All other fields define each point or line event's attribute information.

When defining an event table's name and fields, be aware that each database has its own rules defining what names and characters are permitted. Refer to your database's documentation for a list of these rules.

For dBASE tables, the process of defining the attributes is separate from creating the table itself. After creating the table, you need to right-click it in the Catalog tree and click Properties to define the attributes. Because they must contain at least one field, the text field Name1 is added. Add the appropriate fields to the dBASE table, then delete the default field. In a dBASE table, a field name must be 10 characters or less; additional characters will be truncated.

An INFO table’s name must be 32 characters or less, and the item names must be 16 characters or less. Items are defined using standard ArcInfo Workstation data types. The input width is the maximum number of characters or bytes used to store the item’s values. For numeric items, the width must be large enough to accommodate the decimal point and negative sign. The display width is the number of spaces used to display values in ArcInfo Workstation; for decimal values, the display width should be one space greater than the input width to account for the decimal point.

For more information about configuration keywords with ArcSDE, see the ArcSDE Configuration and Tuning Guide for <DBMS> PDF file.