Sorry for the long delay, been away at the esri Africa UC...
Yes, if you have a pile of Fc's inside a fd, the SR is defined at the fd level. You can only change it by copying out the fc to another fd or using the project tool (and putting the output somewhere else).
Not sure what the error is, but instead of redefining each fc did you try to redefine just the sr of the fd?
So I have a workable sollution to this based on everyone's feedback (see code below). The only nagging issue is that when I run recursiveDatasets in main() after redefining all feature classes and datasets, when I print spatialReference.name, it's still printing the old spatial reference I checked the SR in ArcCatalog for each FC and FD, and they have indeed been redefined:
So why is it still printing the old SR? Is that output being drawn from a different parameter than that being displayed in the XY Coordinate System tab? I have also tried refreshing the geodatabase following the redefinition, but that makes no difference.
Code:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import os from os import path import arcpy from arcpy import env from sets import Set import time, datetime from datetime import date arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True def recursiveDatasets(workspace): """ Function iterates through a file geodatabase using arcpy.da.walk and returns a tuple containing three lists: 1) uniqueFD, containing paths to each feature dataset in the geodatabase; 2) miscDatasets, containing all feature classes in a geodatabase not inside a feature dataset; 3) descriptions, containing description objects for every feature class and feature dataset in the target geodatabase. Parameter: Workspace """ miscDatasets = [] featureDatasets = [] descriptions = [] for dirpath, path, filenames in arcpy.da.Walk(workspace): for filename in filenames: desc = arcpy.Describe(os.path.join(dirpath, filename)) if hasattr(desc, 'path'): descPth = arcpy.Describe(desc.path) descriptions.append(desc) if hasattr(descPth, 'dataType'): if descPth.dataType == 'FeatureDataset': featureDatasets.append(dirpath) else: miscDatasets.append(os.path.join(dirpath, filename)) uniqueFD = list(set(featureDatasets)) return uniqueFD, miscDatasets, descriptions def defineProjection(workspace): """ Function redefines the existing projection for feature datasets and feature classes not residing in feature datasets in a geodatabase. Parameter: workspace """ uniqueFD, miscDatasets, descriptions = recursiveDatasets(workspace) for FC in miscDatasets: desc = arcpy.Describe(FC) if desc.datasetType == 'FeatureClass': arcpy.DefineProjection_management(FC, newProjection) for FD in uniqueFD: arcpy.DefineProjection_management(FD, newProjection) def main(): workspace = arcpy.env.workspace = os.path.join(r'C:\Scripts\Redefine Projection\MyGeodatabase.gdb') newProjection = arcpy.SpatialReference(25832) # wkid for 'ETRS_1989_UTM_Zone_32N' defineProjection(workspace) uniqueFD, miscDatasets, newDescriptions = recursiveDatasets(workspace) FCs = [] newSRs = [] for dataset in newDescriptions: if dataset.datasetType == 'FeatureClass': FCs.append(os.path.join(dataset.Path, dataset.Name)) newSRs.append(dataset.spatialReference.name) print newSRs if __name__ == '__main__': main()
