Domain/Subtype Descriptions not Present in Clipped Feature Classes

[anonymous_geographer]

Hello,

I noticed that our File GDB feature class exports were not retaining the Domain/Subtype descriptions if they were clipped using ArcGIS Pro.  I'm currently clipping feature classes from our enterprise SDE to an output File GDB.

After some testing, using the Clip (Analysis) tool within ArcMap will automatically include these descriptions and the domains transfer successfully, but ArcGIS Pro is not doing this for me.

I attempted to set the environment settings for the Clip (Analysis) Tool to transfer domains, but the environmental settings for this specific tool do not include that option. I also attempted to force this setting within a Python 3.x script, but that did not work either, nor did the Pairwise Clip tool allow for this.

Is this difference between ArcMap's Clip (Analysis) and ArcGIS Pro's Clip (Analysis) intended, or is this a bug...? I'm currently running ArcMap 10.7.1 and Pro 2.8.2.

Thanks for any insight!

[anonymous_geographer · Accepted solution]

I have solved this myself for both ArcGIS Pro and Python scripting.

Within ArcGIS Pro, instead of going to the tool-specific environment settings, go to your Environments section under the Analysis tab. From there, you can toggle some settings to fix this. For the Domain/Subtype descriptions to properly export via Pro and Python, I needed to toggle the checkboxes for "Transfer Geodatabase Field Properties" and "Transfer Field Domain Descriptions".

My python script required the "Transfer Geodatabase Field Properties" setting to be set to True regardless of the "Transfer Field Domain Descriptions" setting.

Having said that, I wish this was a universal setting to adjust within the Pro application settings and not something I need to specify within each ArcGIS Pro project. Anyway, I'm glad I sorted this out, and I hope this post helps someone else with similar headaches!