BUG-000155637 for ArcGIS Pro

Bug ID Number	BUG-000155637
Submitted	February 6, 2023
Last Modified	June 5, 2024
Applies to	ArcGIS Pro
Version found	2.9
Operating System	Windows OS
Operating System Version	N/A
Status	As Designed

Additional Information

The CIM often only persist changes made to an element in a project (to reduce the amount of bloat that would otherwise need to be persisted). In the case with field descriptions, the newly added data does not have any changes, therefore, nothing is persisted in the CIM. As a workaround, faking an alteration of a field in a feature or table can result in the information being persisted in the CIM. The following code uses arcpy.AlterField (but simply keeps the field info the same). First, it reports zero field descriptions for a feature class and a table, makes the modifications, then reports the field description counts. p = arcpy.mp.ArcGISProject('current') m = p.listMaps()[0] lyr = m.listLayers('NE_State_Boundaries')[0] tab = m.listTables('CensusData')[0] #Try returning cim field defs - NOPE lyr_cim = lyr.getDefinition('V3') print(f'LYR desc count PRE mod: {len(lyr_cim.featureTable.fieldDescriptions)}') tab_cim = tab.getDefinition('V3') print(f'TAB desc count PRE mod: {len(tab_cim.fieldDescriptions)}') #Modify fields lyrFld = arcpy.ListFields(lyr)[0] arcpy.management.AlterField(lyr, lyrFld.name, lyrFld.name, lyrFld.name) tabFld = arcpy.ListFields(tab)[0] arcpy.management.AlterField(tab, tabFld.name, tabFld.name, tabFld.name) #Try again lyr_cim = lyr.getDefinition('V3') print(f'LYR desc count POST mod: {len(lyr_cim.featureTable.fieldDescriptions)}') tab_cim = tab.getDefinition('V3') print(f'TAB desc count POST mod: {len(tab_cim.fieldDescriptions)}')