Let’s crack the lid on ArcGIS Pro 3.5 and take a peek at what the Geodatabase Team has put in there. I’ll give a high-level overview of the main features we’ve added, and we can dig deeper into the details of some of these things in future posts.

Here’s a quick list of the main new features:

• Attribute Rules Project settings
• Assign attribute rules to multiple subtypes
• New attribute rule templates
• Multiselect and drag when importing rules
• Prune Branch History geoprocessing tool
• Geodatabase Potpourri
  • Allow creating field names greater than 30 characters
  • Linear referencing – draw and label routes
  • Full-text indexes
  • Support SQL as an expression type in the Calculate Field geoprocessing tool for file and mobile geodatabases

Attribute rules

We continue to push attribute rules forward each release by adding new functionality, fine-tuning the user experience and improving their performance where we can. We’ve made several updates at ArcGIS Pro 3.5 that we hope you can take advantage of.

Attribute Rules Project settings

Sometimes the default options just aren’t for you. We were hearing complaints from people describing how they need to change the options in the Error Inspector every time they run their rules—always turning batch calculation rules off or only evaluating rules shown in the current extent. We’ve added these configurations to the Options dialog box under a new Attribute Rules tab.

So, if you find yourself always using the same settings, you can just set them here once and forget about it. We’ll be publishing a blog shortly with more details about these new options and when you would want to use them.

Assign attribute rules to multiple subtypes

This one is kind of a follow-up to triggering fields, something we added in the ArcGIS Pro 3.4 release. With triggering fields, you can make your attribute rules fire more granularly, activating only when specific fields are updated instead of whenever any update is made to a class. We wanted a similar experience with subtypes.

Prior to ArcGIS Pro 3.5, you could either assign an attribute rule to all, none, or a single subtype. But how we model the world is more nuanced than that. Sometimes a rule is applicable to a specific combination of subtypes, and sometimes to a specific set of fields on those subtypes.

In ArcGIS Pro 3.5, you can now assign attribute rules to multiple subtypes as well as update which subtypes apply to an existing rule. In conjunction with triggering fields, this can really help you dial in exactly when a rule needs to fire. This cuts down on overall processing of attribute rules and frees up more time so you can be more productive while editing.

New attribute rule templates

In the ArcGIS Pro 3.4 release, we added some new attribute rule templates to the creation experience. These offer a UI/UX similar to a geoprocessing tool that you step through and fill in parameters instead of writing the whole attribute rule in Arcade. We added three of these last release to make some of the more commonly used rules more accessible.

In ArcGIS Pro 3.5, we continue this trend by adding another new rule template and updating one from last release with a helpful new option:

• Generate Update Related—An attribute rule that updates records in a related class when updates are made to an input table or feature class.

• Generate ID – Sequence By Intersect—An update to the Generate ID template attribute rule. This adds the ability to pull field values from an intersecting dataset to generate unique ID values on the input features.

The team is putting together a blog series on all the new template attribute rules with examples and info on how to use and tweak them to work for you. I’ll link to those here as they become available.

Multiselect and drag when importing rules

Rounding out the attribute rule enhancements, we’ve added some quality of life improvements to importing rules. You can now drag a .csv file from a folder in File Explorer directly into the Attribute Rules view to import rules. The Import Rules dialog box also now supports multiselect. So, if you have multiple .csv files containing attribute rules that you want to bring into ArcGIS Pro, it all just got a lot easier.

Prune Branch History geoprocessing tool

We’ve added a new geoprocessing tool to prune the branch history table. I know this is something people have wanted for a while.

As you make edits to branch versioned data, the business table tracking those edits continues to grow. In cases in which a substantial number of edits are being made, this can eventually lead to performance degradation in editing and querying time. There were requests on the Esri Community pages to offer a trim tool for branch management, and we’re happy to oblige with the Prune Branch History tool in ArcGIS Pro 3.5.

The tool has options for precisely when you would like to make your cut and how to manage the historical data. Read Elaine and Melissa’s Prune like a pro blog to learn how best to use the new tool.

Geodatabase potpourri

There were a lot of other minor features and close to 200 bugs fixed in ArcGIS Pro 3.5 from our team. Around 30 of these came directly from customer support. So, a smorgasbord of fixes for specific customer problems and then general quality and performance improvements that we’re hoping will help in your day-to-day workflows.

I won’t list them all, but I did think these were worth mentioning:

Allow creating field names greater than 30 characters

When it comes to field names, the underlying geodatabase or RDBMS is ultimately responsible for how long it can be. In the past, we went with a lowest common denominator approach and capped the field name length to a 30-character limit that some RDBMSs imposed.

So, prior to ArcGIS Pro 3.5, if you tried to enter a field name greater than 30 characters in Fields view or the Feature Class wizard, you would encounter an error.

Of course, people were confused and complained about this seemingly arbitrary requirement. Also, some RDBMSs have since updated that length, and so it was time for us to have a new approach as well.

With ArcGIS Pro 3.5, we implemented a new design that references your data storage and adjusts the field length limit accordingly. In Fields view, we no longer do an on-the-fly validation of the field name. Instead, when you save, we ask the underlying database what length it accepts and, if the name is over, it will get truncated to that limit.

Below is a quick reference of those field name length limits, but of course, you should reference your RDBMS documentation for specific limitations:

• File geodatabase and memory workspace – 128 characters
• SQLite and most enterprise geodatabases – 128 characters with 256-byte maximum
• SQL – 128 characters
• PostgreSQL – 63 bytes
• SAP HANA – 127 bytes
• Oracle – 128 bytes

Hopefully, this alleviates any confusion and NowUsersAreAbleToHaveAFieldThatIsNamedWithThisFieldNameThatYouAreCurrentlyReadingRightNowIsntItAbsolutelyTheBeesKneesLookAtItGo!

Linear referencing

We continue to chip away at adding linear referencing workflows to ArcGIS Pro. In the 3.5 release, we’ve added commands to the Find Routes pane for Draw Route Location  and Label Route Location . These will help you find and visualize your route features by creating graphic layers to label or draw segments of a route that matches the search criteria you’ve input.

Full-text indexes

A new geoprocessing tool, Add Full-Text Index, allows you to create full-text indexes in your mobile or enterprise geodatabases. These are like attribute indexes but for improving query response when searching large volumes of text for specific words or phrases.

Support SQL as an expression type in the Calculate Field geoprocessing tool for file and mobile geodatabases

We’d heard some chatter on the Esri Community pages and in-house about wanting this one. Calculate Field is one of the most used functions in ArcGIS Pro. The option to use SQL expressions when performing calculations can make them faster and more efficient. Prior to ArcGIS Pro 3.5, this was only available for enterprise geodatabases, so we added support for it on file and mobile geodatabases as well.

Unfortunately, almost immediately upon release of ArcGIS Pro 3.5, we found an issue with the tool (which is described in this knowledge article). We quickly provided a fix which is found in ArcGIS Pro 3.5 Patch 1 (3.5.1). So let this be a gentle reminder to update your version of ArcGIS Pro when patches become available.

Enjoy ArcGIS Pro 3.5

OK, that should do it. I hope that adds some context and gets you excited to try out some new toys. If you want to see more goodies that got put into ArcGIS Pro 3.5, you can catch some highlights in Caitlyn and Christie’s ArcGIS Pro Update post. For the full list, check the What’s new topic in the help system. And if you want more info on anything and everything geodatabase related, have a look around our Geodatabase Resources Hub.

Enjoy the new release. And remember to keep us posted on any concerns, ideas, or enhancements you may have through the Esri Community pages.