Add property to table objects determining if they are a view or not

AlfredBaldenweck — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 03:24:44 GMT

There is no way in arcpy to determine if an object is a view or a real table, or, for that matter, no easy way period to tell if an object is a view or not, even in Catalog.

Adding an isView() property would make things very easy; we would not have to resort to checking if the table is editable (error-prone) or using a naming convention ("recent_nests_VIEW") to verify our inventory of tables.

Please add some sort of property to Describe to let us do this.

Re: Add property to table objects determining if they are a view or not

HaydenWelch — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:06:58 GMT

Huh, I've never really used views and usually just use layer definition queries. Seems like a useful feature if it was made clear that a view is defined by a query. The view definition is even transparent to da.Describe. It lists the View as a `DEFeatureClass` and not a

You can see that a featureclass is a view if you open the properties, but that means there is an internal API that can tell that it's a view.

To add to this proposal, there should be a subtype of `DEFeatureClass`/`DETable` called `DEFeatureView`/`DETableView` or something similar. These types should have a definition property that clarifies the type.

Changes to arcpy/typing/describe/base.pyi:

class Table(TableBase, EditorTracking): ... class FeatureClass(FeatureClassBase, EditorTracking): ... + class TableView(Table): + @property + def definition(self) -> str: + """The SQL Definition of the TableView""" + + class FeatureClassView(FeatureClass): + @property + def definition(self) -> str: + """The SQL Definition of the FeatureClassView"""

Changes to /arcpy/typing/describe/__init__.py

... DescribeDataTypes: TypeAlias = Literal[ ... "VPFTable", "Workspace", + "TableView", + "FeatureClassView", ]

Because the code that interfaces with the View is not part of the public API currently, just adding this here and still treating the View as a `DEFeatureClass`/`DETable` internally should be very backwards compatible while allowing developers to quickly retrieve the View definitions. Because the View definition isn't editable anyways, keeping the definition property R/O is fine, this will just allow tools that pull an old definition, update the query, and replace the View with a new View.

idea Add property to table objects determining if they are a view or not in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Add property to table objects determining if they are a view or not

Re: Add property to table objects determining if they are a view or not