Best Practise/Way to reorder, rename fields, alter schema in a GDB

[timdunlevie]

Hi all,

We have an ArcGIS spatial database.

It has roughly 70 Feature Classes.

It was populated a few years back...

I now want to clean the database up a bit and change various field names, re-order some of the fields, remove redundant fields.

It's a simple gdb with no domains or other relationships....just a heap of FCs.

From reading there's no easy way to change the db schema ?

I'm thinking of exporting the SDE to .XML, do edits to the schema there...and somehow get the data back into the new schema??

Anyone had any experience doing this? And what is the best way to go about it ?

The other idea I had was to create new FCs and Append the old data to the new FC schema....

Thanks,

Tim

[OwenEarley]

Yes - you will still need to get your data into the new schema. I haven't seen any tools within ArcGIS Diagrammer to do this.

[deleted-user-8KkqhMYcTNGx]

The Xray reorder fields tool can reorder the fields of a feature class that has data within it... So there would be no need to append. It just modifies the schema of the existing feature class.

[timdunlevie]

Thanks Joe….will have to investigate this tool.

thanks

[BradS]

XToolsPro is an amazing little extension for ArcGIS - lots of useful tools. So if you have it, it has a tool called "Table Restructure". Fields can be reordered, renamed, even change the capitalization, and you can change the field type.

or Esri seems to have a workaround: 41727 - Change the order of field names in an attribute table