ArcGIS should allow the ability to permanently reorder fields in a table

59746
209
04-20-2010 01:33 PM
Status: Under Consideration
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NewingtonConnecticut
New Contributor II

After creating a feature class, it would be convenient to go back after data input, and make changes to the field ordering (position).

209 Comments
BlairHornung1

What's with the nose gazing Ray?

I am not being lazy when I am sorting through dozens of feature classes (that other people ordered chaotically) with hundreds of fields in Catalog, or burying deep into an SDE in SQL developer doing off-the-cuff explorations and development upon messy data structures. Creating neat and tidy custom queries every time, or running a feature class to feature class is not desirable to many people. If ESRI can do most mundane tasks 3 different ways from Sunday, why not build a tool like this to let the users work the way they want it done?

All weez want is a little efficiency

RayChilcote

Joseph Rigley, Blair Hornung

I upvoted this a decade ago.  It would be a nice-to-have.  Not denying that.

It sounds easy.  A dbf or access database is one thing.  Countless RDBMS's that do not allow changes in place is another.  Granted, Esri could make it available where it is easy to get accomplished.  But I do not expect it to be accomplished any time soon on RDBMS's.

I gave 2 avenues to get the end result.  I shared because some don't know fields can indeed be reordered (albeit not in place).

MattWilkie1

Cue broken record: we've been asking to be able to permanently reorder fields in place for 20 years, since ArcMap v8. We see "only" ~33,000 votes now because that's this is just the latest incarnation of the feature request.

It hasn't been done because it's hard. Changing a column's ordinal position is not in the SQL standard and not supported by most database vendors. There are two notable exceptions I'm aware of: MS Access and MySQL. There are various workarounds and most require recreating the table and deleting the original (a couple methods using this approach are described in this thread). My personal favourite so far is re-ordering in MS Access via personal gdb.

However, it is to Esri's shame that they've never come out and said "Hey look, we hear you, we understand what you want. This, this, and this are why we haven't developed a solution". For that I am truly angry with them. It was only after a lot of time working in different problem domains and doing my own research that I understand why. Please Esri, live the courage of your convictions, and declare them (and why) when you have them.

Banff_GIS_Department

That is well said Matt. We can understand why this has not happened, but an ESRI acknowledgment of the techy reasons behind the apparent impasse might go some way to smoothing things in the customer relationship around this issue! Ray does offer some insights here, but after so long perhaps they are not sufficient...

JosephRigley

Ray, you did provide work-arounds and I should have at least acknowledged that. I see what you are getting at with attempting to explain the complexity as well.

Nevertheless, if ESRI's desktop apps can handle all the steps involved in an intersect process in a single tool, they can handle all the steps required to provide an abstracted, apparently 'in-place' field re-ordering and all the steps needed to make it happen properly, especially give the demand, marketing claims, and cost of software. This is the whole point of a button-pusher desktop front-end. It's largely irrelevant that behind the scenes a new table might have to be created and the data moved there and any dependencies handled cleanly. EDIT: ie, that it's hard is irrelevant. Is this enterprise software or not? The cost is definitely there.

AngelaPollett

If making a copy of the feature class isn't an issue for you, an easy solution that I've just been shown by ESRI (thanks Chris) is to use the feature class to feature class conversion tool. This allows the reordering of fields that is then permanently saved in a new feature class. 

JamalNUMAN

Thanks Angela.

 

We could find out several workarounds but wanted to know if reordering fields is eventually technically impossible.

AndrewQuee

Worthy (and correct) suggestions, but what happens when the feature class is in a feature dataset, is participating in a topology, subject to Pro attribute rules, or other Esri-land features specific to that (and only that) particular feature class?  I think this strikes at the heart of the issue.  Even if re-creating or renaming the feature class back to the original name can be done, trying to remember and recreate linkages to other GDB objects is the issue people are leery of I believe.*

Hence "ArcGIS should allow the ability to permanently reorder fields in a table."  ArcGIS taking care of all of those thing with the Esri ecosystem.  Not you.

* Assumptions untested.

davedoesgis

And a SUPER SIMPLE way to do it in ArcPy please!!!

FieldMappings are a pain. 

RyanBohan
The best work around I can think of is add all new fields in the "preferred" order, field calculate each field and then delete all the old fields. 
I would think that could be done with a bit of python, first objectid and geometry to a new feature class, then just joining the old fields one at a time in the new order.