topic Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB in Data Management Questions

Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

timdunlevie — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 08:37:13 GMT

Hi all,

We have an ArcGIS spatial database.

It has roughly 70 Feature Classes.

It was populated a few years back...

I now want to clean the database up a bit and change various field names, re-order some of the fields, remove redundant fields.

It's a simple gdb with no domains or other relationships....just a heap of FCs.

From reading there's no easy way to change the db schema ?

I'm thinking of exporting the SDE to .XML, do edits to the schema there...and somehow get the data back into the new schema??

Anyone had any experience doing this? And what is the best way to go about it ?

The other idea I had was to create new FCs and Append the old data to the new FC schema....

Thanks,

Tim

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

JayantaPoddar — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 09:09:17 GMT

Hi Tim,

Have you tried Sort (Data Management) tool?

And Renaming a field (ArcGIS 10.2 and later).

Thanks,

Jay

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

timdunlevie — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 12:05:45 GMT

Thanks for the reply but I dont need to sort values in a field but need to reorder column/metadata names, remove columns, rename columns etc..

thanks

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

JayantaPoddar — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 13:16:41 GMT

Hi Tim,

You could try ArcGIS Diagrammer

Thanks,

Jay

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

JohnBrodnicki — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 13:17:33 GMT

The "Alter Field" tool would help with renaming fields. I don't know of any tools available in Arc to re-order fields. I think your best bet will be to create new feature classes with the correct/updated schema and append the data. If everything goes right, you could then delete the old features classes and rename the new ones to the old feature class names. If you have GlobalIDs, you may want to do some research to make sure the GlodalbID doesn't change when you append the data. If you don't have any replicas, relationship classes, or joins based on GlobalID then this would be a non-issue.

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

deleted-user-8KkqhMYcTNGx — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 15:11:45 GMT

The Xray for Geodatabases Add In has a Reorder Fields Tool, which sounds like it may be exactly what you are looking for. Here is the Link: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=9ea218ff575f4a5195e01a2cae03a0ae

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

OwenEarley — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:01:36 GMT

Jayanta has already mentioned one - ArcGIS Diagrammer is a useful tool for creating or adjusting a geodatabase schema.

If you create your new schema FME Desktop has some good tools for mapping data from a source to a target feature class. It is a commercial product but it may save you some time. The alternative is using the Simple Data Loader or Append tool.

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

deleted-user-8KkqhMYcTNGx — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 21:23:16 GMT

It should also be mentioned that ArcGIS Diagrammer has not been upgraded to work with ArcGIS Desktop version 10.3... So depending on which version of the software you are running it will not work.

Please help Promote this Idea to add ArcGIS Diagrammer functionality to Version 10.3

http://ideas.arcgis.com/ideaView?id=087E0000000CuxTIAS

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

timdunlevie — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 23:38:15 GMT

Thanks John,

Yeah I was thinking of doing it the hard way – new FC, append existing data.

Yeah we haven’t assigned GlobIDs as yet….we intend to roll out the replication to other sites later.

Thanks,

Tim

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

timdunlevie — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 23:45:27 GMT

Thanks.

I did have a look at ArcGIS Diagrammer.

I like the fact it’s simple to use to adjust/create/edit schema design…but I still have to re-import/append data to the new design right?

Thanks,

Tim

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

OwenEarley — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 23:55:04 GMT

Yes - you will still need to get your data into the new schema. I haven't seen any tools within ArcGIS Diagrammer to do this.

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

deleted-user-8KkqhMYcTNGx — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:07:12 GMT

The Xray reorder fields tool can reorder the fields of a feature class that has data within it... So there would be no need to append. It just modifies the schema of the existing feature class.

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

timdunlevie — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 23:53:19 GMT

Thanks Joe….will have to investigate this tool.

thanks

Re: Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

BradS — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 18:24:27 GMT

XToolsPro is an amazing little extension for ArcGIS - lots of useful tools. So if you have it, it has a tool called "Table Restructure". Fields can be reordered, renamed, even change the capitalization, and you can change the field type.

or Esri seems to have a workaround: 41727 - Change the order of field names in an attribute table