Receiving error 001486 on all joined tables: Intended Functionality?

[ForrestBowlick]

I have been receiving error 001486 whenever I try to calculate geometry on a joined table, even when the field that calculation is going into is associated with the shapefile I'm baseing my calculation on. See screenshot below:

As you can see, 'towns', my input features, is a shapefile:

And the 'Area_km' is part of that attribute table. The error implies that this is due to the field being in the joined table:

Description

If a layer has a table joined to it, editing fields from the join table is not allowed.

Solution

Make sure the fields that are edited are present in the input table and not the joined table.

But this is not the case! My question is: Is Calculating Geometry always prevented with joined tables? If so, why?

[DanPatterson]

If you want the geometry attributes from another table, don't use calculate geometry, just do a simple field calculation to your destination table in a new double field to receive the values.  As to the why, geometry is to be read from a source table/featureclass because it owns it.

[ForrestBowlick]

No, I want to use calculate geometry to make a novel calculation of area for the shapefile. I don't have it in the joined table. The geometry attributes are being calculated directly from the shapefile.

The joined table has other things in it, like population. For this exercise, where we are calculating population density and doing other work, we need to both calculate the geometry of the shape, and then do a field calculator for density (things/area).

[DanPatterson]

Use the Add Geometry Attributes tool from Arctoolbox then

[ForrestBowlick]

Incredibly, this also fails when the table is joined.

Working with Geometry on a joined table in ArcMap works fine: 

So I remain curious about if this is the intended functionality, and if it is, why it changed from ArcMap.

[Robert_LeClair]

Forrest - from what I'm seeing in the internals, a customer had the exact same issue.  The solution was to remove the Join, run the Calculate Geometry GP tool, and then rebuild the Join.  Not sure the workflow change from ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro...

Second option is if the fields in the Joined table are required, export it out to a new feature class and then run your Calculate Geometry GP tool on the new FC.

[ForrestBowlick]

Robert, that workflow makes sense, and has been the workaround. But you can imagine for people learning ArcPro, and in the case of my class, are seeing it for the second time, this error is confusing/frustrating and derails what in ArcMap was a clear learning process - Join Data, Add Field, Calculate.

[Robert_LeClair]

Agree that the workflow should mirror ArcMap.  I did a quick cursory overview of ArcGIS Ideas to see if there was an idea for the developers to add this functionality to Pro and did not see one created.  You may want to add a new idea for the ArcGIS Pro community so it gets views from the Dev Team.  Not an ideal solution granted but a path to move forward.