Permanently Re-Order Feature Drawing Order When Exporting Layer

[CameronLacelle]

Is there a way to re-order the feature drawing order when exporting a feature in ArcGIS Pro? I have used the Feature Drawing Order tool in the Symbology pane in Pro but this is not retained when exporting to a shapefile (or other format). I also have used the sort layer options in the export layer tool but this also does not re-order the drawing order of the feature class.

Essentially what I want to do is export a feature class I have received from my Provincial Government to use in our internal GIS application. It needs to be exported from a GDB feature to a shapefile to be compatible with our current internal GIS application. I want the smallest features to be drawn on top and the larger features drawn on the bottom, which is not how the data is delivered (I believe it's ordered by observation dates).

If anybody can offer any insight in an easy way to accomplish this, it would be greatly appreciated.

[CameronLacelle · Accepted solution]

Soon after writing this post I looked at the sort order tool in Pro and I guess sorting by ascending for Shape_Area, even though it will display the smallest features first in the attribute table, it will draw them last. Features at the bottom of the attribute table of a feature class will be drawn on top by default. A bit confusing but I suppose it makes sense.