ArcGIS Pro Metadata Document Inclusions

StephenRowlands

Enclosing documentation files within the feature class is still available in ArcMap but does not appear as a feature in ArcGIS Pro. The data ports across to the updated database and can is visible in the metadata but can not be accessed.

AletaVienneau · ‎10-13-2022

For performance reasons, this capability will not be supported in ArcGIS Pro.

Enclosing documents within an item's metadata was originally provided in ArcCatalog 8.0 as a stop-gap measure to help people transition from recording an item's metadata in Word or text files, to creating true standards-based metadata XML documents. Over time the use of enclosures has been extended and continued beyond its original intent in some organizations, which is understandable since it provides convenient access to files that are relevant to a specific dataset or cartographic product.

However, while enclosures can be useful they have a negative consequence. Adding enclosures increases the size of a metadata document unnecessarily. We recently determined that when an enterprise geodatabase contains larger metadata documents, the overall performance of working with data in the enterprise geodatabase is decreased for drawing and analyzing spatial data and data management operations. Now that we know larger metadata documents affect data performance, we can't encourage anyone to continue the practice of enclosing files within an item’s metadata. Full standards-based metadata documents with a thumbnail generated by ArcGIS software are a small enough size that they do not impact performance.

We encourage people to move any enclosed documents out of their metadata using ArcCatalog. Place existing files on your internal network, or publish the documents to a Sharepoint, OneDrive, or Google Drive site. Set privileges for sharing the document appropriately on the network share or on the file sharing site to determine who can access the document, and reference the shared document from the item's metadata. You can embed the link within the item’s description, or explicitly cross-reference the file on the Resource > References page in the metadata editor.