Export Domains and Subtypes Using the Geodatabase XML Workspace Document Schema Reader

Purpose:

To read all possible schema elements from an ESRI Geodatabase XML Workspace Document.

Summary:

• Use the XML reader with feature paths to get detailed schema information at the dataset, feature class and field levels.

• Dataset level data includes domains and subtypes

• Also retrieves dataset metadata.

Approach:

To get a characterization of the geodatabase schema, we can use the XML reader to read an Esri Geodatabase XML Workspace schema document. You need to export the Esri Geodatabase XML Workspace document using the Esri tools in ArcCatalog as described here.

The XML reader is configured with elements to match = 'Domain Subtype DataElement' and flattening enabled, yielding 3 source feature types, Domain Subtype and DataElement. The Domain and Subtype feature types list all domains and subtypes for your dataset, but not which tables or fields use them. For complete info per table, including a list of fields, types and domains / subtypes used - refer to the records in FeatureClasses and Feature Datasets destination feature types. Note that these have one record per table, with a list of fields for each table.

To get one record per field, a ListExploder is used to flatten out the lists. Also, AttributeKeeper help get rid of superfluous attributes.

Usage Notes:

• If you want to read the schema from another type of geodatabase you can just export it to a XML workspace document using ArcGIS.
• This does not require any data to work - so you can run it on an empty database
• There is a lot of information extracted by the XML reader, much of which may be superfluous or redundant. Once you have the info you need, delete parts of the workspace you are not using to improve performance