I normally have to cheat (sorry workaround) and take the dbf into Access (normally renaming it so it's less than eight characters long so Access recognises it), it's a pain, surely such a simple database task should be available in ArcGIS. Especially useful would be the ability to change field names, lengths and order.
Shapefiles, gdb, sde who cares what the data is held as or in - needs change overtime.
Yep... the reason I user ET Geowizards was because I want to reorder fields and it would be really nice if Esri put this ability back in... I am a workstation left over :)
I agree that renaming fields has challenges based on your RDBMS, but, reordering the fields should be really simple. I'm still using 9.3.1, but I've heard now in 10, you can reorder fields within an ArcMap session. Why not take this functionality and put it on the server side instead of limiting it to the MXD side of things. All you would have to do is add a short, simple, table that lists the fields and their position and expose a table, tab, or other way to easily edit the "Position Number" of each field. The table could look something like: [Feature Dataset], [Feature Class], [Field Name], [Field Position]
So, when accessing the "Polygon_Test_fc" feature class, the attribute table would show up with the Road name, followed by the Alias name, followed by the GID by default.
The [Field Position] could be a short integer, the others would be whatever unique identifier, string, or whatever is convenient to integrate with existing indentifiers for this information.
Then, all you would have to do is tell the desktop software, ArcGIS Server, etc... that, when they access this data, first review this table, and then apply that order to the fields in displaying them client side.
Maybe I'm way off the mark on this one, not sure, but, that's what comes to my mind as a really quick and strait-forward solution to providing at least one of these very highly demanded features.
When this will be possible (field rename), ArcMap should also ensure automatic update of every query, label or symbology linked to renamed field either in currently opened MXDs or when map document with modified layer is opened.
Yes also agree. Field order is a function we would like to have other GIS staff use in a personal geodatabase to prepare layers for submission to central gis database. Currently we export XML schema, shuffle the field array order, load the schema and load the data.
Some RDMS may have limitations hindering the creation of such tool. However, different RDMS can be inspected by the tool to indentify if it is possible or not ... So the tool can be created but will not run on all systems and that is acceptable.
Thank you for all of your input. We are currently considering adding the ability to rename fields and change some of the field properties to a future release.
Having the ability to reorder the fields at the database level would be extremely helpful. I have been using the reorder fields tool from the ArcScripts gallery, has been working with ArcGIS 10 until SP2. Being able to reorder the fields into a more useable workflow (without having to recreate the entire feature class) also helps with custom form development in both ArcPad and ArcGIS Mobile.
