topic Re: Arcade - Spatial reference expected in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Arcade - Spatial reference expected

aricraimundo — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 21:49:35 GMT

Hi,

I'm working with an Arcade expression in ArcGIS Pro Advanced 3.5.2 on Windows 11, using a File Geodatabase (v10.0).

I'm trying to create an immediate calculation attribute rule triggered on Insert or Update of a polygon feature class. The rule is intended to extract two fields (FIELD1 and FIELD2) from another polygon feature class based on maximum area of intersection.

Both of my polygon feature classes have defined spatial references, so I don't believe it's a projection issue. However, when I attempt to calculate the area of the intersection geometry (line 25), I get this error:

Arcade error: Spatial reference expected.

Here is my expression:

I've reviewed my Arcade expression and can't spot any obvious issue.

I also came across BUG-000176749, and I'm wondering if this might be related.

Has anyone else encountered this error or have insight into what might be causing it?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Re: Arcade - Spatial reference expected

RTPL_AU — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:43:04 GMT

@aricraimundo
Does "commonGeometry" have a coordinate system once it has been created from the intersect?
I don't know Arcade very well and it is full of weird things.
Try assigning a coordsys prior to the area calc.

Re: Arcade - Spatial reference expected

aricraimundo — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 01:31:01 GMT

Yes, it does.

And commonGeometry is a Polygon. I’ve used TypeOf to confirm.

I agree with you on “weird things”.

Re: Arcade - Spatial reference expected

AlexisHandelman — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 22:21:49 GMT

Did you find a solution or work around. We recently upgraded our environment and now our previously working attribute rules stopped working with the same error. Ours are almost identical to yours. They return a field from an intersecting polygon feature class and returns the value from the feature of greatest overlap.

Re: Arcade - Spatial reference expected

JoeNunn — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 12:13:39 GMT

I have just been testing using ArcGIS 3.5.4 to ugrade within our team and immediatly stumbled into this issue getting the Arcade error: Spatial reference expected. on an arcade field calculation. I managed to get it to work on 3.4 but not in 3.5.4 giving the same error. The line of code it failed on was this:

intersectArea += Area(intersection($feature,block), "square metres");

Would be good to know if this is fixed so we can trust an upgrade?

Re: Arcade - Spatial reference expected

Juan_Toro-Killion — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:11:42 GMT

I'm experiencing the same thing with Pro 3.5.4 too. Very frustrating.