arcgis-10.1arcgis-desktopattribute-joinsrelates
I have two shapefiles of essentially the same objects however, one shapefile has terrible spatial data but great attribute data and the other is the reverse. What I'm looking to do is essentially a join but there are no common fields that I can use as the joining attribute.
Without that common field, I don't believe this is possible, but I thought I'd ask in case someone has done this in the past.
Strange that you can do this one way but not the other. That would leave me a bit concerned as to whether the spatial join was correct for every point?
So this doesn't get confusing lets be specific about the datasets. You want to join data set "A"'s attributes to dataset "B" but you can only do it the other way round?
A quick solution would be to :
1) Copy the FID of dataset A to a new field e.g. "A_FID2" 2) Spatially join B to A. 3) Copy the A_FID2 value to a new field in dataset B. 4) Table Join A to B via the common FID2 value.
5) If there is not an equal number of points in each dataset sum the A_FID2 values in each table. If all points have been successfully joined the values will be equal.
NB: FIDs are cannot be relied on to be stable when a dataset is edited - hence the copying to FID2 to fix the number for use as a key.
Also, the process above will create allot of redundant data in the intermediate steps, so use an "in memory" workspace.
I would do the following things to make life easier:
Before you do this, make a backup of your shapefile.
(choose no geometry) 
this is the Field tab I am referring to
Don't forget to toggle editing before and after deleting unnecessary field
Best Answer
Do you need to have them as a shapefile? If not, try creating a new .gdb and feature class. Create the fields you want/need. Then begin loading the data from your shapefiles to the fields of your choice. It may not be as automated as you would like but this should work. You could export it out again as a .shp if you prefer that or need it as a deliverable.