“Gloom, despair, and agony on me.

Deep, dark depression, excessive misery.”

In January 2015, we wrote a blog post titled Esri Domains 101.  Anybody that has constructed lengthy domains knows the “Excessive misery” that this causes. In this post, we discuss the productivity-enhancing procedure of exporting an existing Geodatabase domain, and importing to another Geodatabase domain. To my knowledge, this is our first “201” post.

There is no immediate method to export a domain from the Database Properties/Domains GUI.  But…there are tools within ArcToolbox with this indirect capability. The first tool may be acquired by opening ArcToolbox and navigating to Data Management Tools/Domains and selecting the “Domain to Table” tool (Figure 1).

Figure 1

The “Domain to Table” GUI appears (figure 2). Below is a description of the necessary inputs:

• Input Database – Source Database (i.e. “Fiber.gdb”)
• Domain Name – Source Domain to Export (i.e. “Fiber Colors”)
• Output Table – Geodatabase (i.e. “Fiber.gdb”) and Table Name (i.e. “FiberColors”)
• Code Field – Name of Code Field of Exported Table (i.e. “Code”)
• Field Description – Name of Field Description Field of Exported Table (i.e. “Desc)

Click the “OK” Button to create the table.

Figure 2

On the flip side, we need to import the table as the new domain via a secondary tool titled “Table to Domain” (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Once the tool appears (Figure 4), input the following parameters in a similar manner:

• Input Table – Table Exported Above (i.e. “FiberColors”)
• Code Field – Name given to the Code Field (i.e. “Code”)
• Description Field – Name given to the Description Field (i.e. “Desc”)
• Input Workspace – Destination Workspace (i.e. “Fiber.gdb”)
• Domain Name – Name of the New Domain (i.e. “Fiber Colors”)
• Domain Description – Name of the New Domain Description (i.e. “Fiber Colors”)

Click the “OK” button to create the new domain.

Figure 4

A few things to consider:

• Make sure to subsequently delete the undesired, exported table or export to a temporary Personal/File Geodatabase.
• When adding a new domain to an Enterprise or Versioned Database, consider the domain owner. It is recommended to create the domain as the applicable feature dataset schema owner.

That’s it. As always….there are multiple methods of doing exactly the same thing. We would love to hear of different methods.

Figure out the source of the initial quote? It is from Hee Haw.  Unfortunately, I know a little too much about the television show because it was usually on as I was growing up.