Setting Field Visibility

JohnDye

Anyone know how to make fields in a Feature Layer visible or hidden?

Tried using the Field Info object, no luck there...

desc = arcpy.Describe("FeatureLayer") field_info = desc.fieldInfo visibleFields = ["ID", "NAME", "Rank", "Count"] for index in xrange(0, field_info.count):     fieldName = str(field_info.getfieldname(index))     if fieldName in visibleFields:         print "Found Field " + str(fieldName) + " in visibleFields. Setting Visible..."         field_info.setvisible(index, "VISIBLE")     else:         print "Field " + str(fieldName) + " not found in visibleFields. Setting Hidden..."         field_info.setvisible(index, "HIDDEN")

Tried tossing a RefreshActiveView() onto the end, that didn't help either.

MattEiben

You're definitely on the right track there.  I ran into this problem a couple months ago.  The key is that field info is a read only attribute, you can't write setvisibility on field in an existing feature layer.

The general workflow is like you have it above.  Make your field info object base on your existing feature layer, then you want to make a new feature layer using the optional "field_info" attribute.

Make Feature Layer (Data Management)

Here my code for that.  I took your code and simplified it just a little.

visibleFields = ["ID", "NAME", "Rank", "Count"] field_info = arcpy.Describe("FeatureLayer").fieldInfo for index in xrange(0, field_info.count):     if field_info.getfieldname(index) not in visibleFields:         field_info.setvisible(index,"HIDDEN")  arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management("FeatureLayer","Feature_Layer_With_New_Visibilities","","",field_info)

If you have symbology and/or labeling, this can mess with that too.  If you're having issues with that, I can dig up a code example.

Hope this helps!