ArcGIS Domain Coded field to field of domain value

Sorry for the confusing title… Basically this is a tutorial of doing something that took me ages to figure out, though it probably shouldn’t have…

So, first off, you need a feature class with a domain field thats within a Geodatabase (The geodatabase has the domain class)

Then, you need to convert the domain to a table>

My Geodatabase is a list of land ownership in Oregon, called Land_lines.gdb

My domain is dom_LLI_PROP_STATUS, which contains abbreviations of the property ownership like: BLM for Bureau of Land Management.. I want a field that just says “Bureau of Land Management” rather than one that looks like it does, but the actual value is “BLM”.

So, using Domain to Table too, (Data Management>Domains) export the domain

This is what my settings looked like. The code field is the field in the table that leads to the domain, like BLM, the Field Description would be the longer description, like Bureau of Land Management.

Go ahead and export this to a table somewhere… (Remember where though…)

You then want to do a join between the table and your original feature class.

So, my feature class is called “Dissolved Land Lines”, and the code field (With BLM etc etc) in is called “PropertyStatus”. I want to do a join on this field, and the exported table with the Code Field (Which I called “Code” in the settings in the screengrab).

I did this by right clicking the feature class (Within ArcMap) and going to “Joins and Relates” and then to “Join…”. Within Join, I selected the “PropertyStatus” field of the feature class to be the field that the join would be based on. Then the table to be joined was the one we exported above, the join field is the “Code Field” field (Named “Code” above). Hit Okay and off it trundles.

If you look in the attributes table there will now be a nice list of all the vales that relate to the “PropertyStatus” field.

Then go ahead and export the feature class or do whatever you want with it!