When importing a shapefile, resulting field name in feature class contains schema and table name

Question

I'm using the following snippet to import a shapefile into a SDE feature class.

arcpy.CopyFeatures_management(inputShapefile, outputFeatureClassName)

where inputShapefile is a shapefile on a mapped drive and outputFeatureClassName is a feature class that will be created on our SDE server.

With the exception of a single field name, all field names in the shapefile appear in the SDE feature class. The exception field is named "AREA" in the shapefile but somewhere along the way it is prefixed with SCHEMA.TABLENAME. Instead of a field named "AREA", it is named "ABC123.tmp.AREA".

I checked the feature class properties in ArcCatalog and this field has an alias that matches what I'm describing. My question, how to I prevent this from happening? I want the field name imported as-is.

update #1 - I tried to fully qualify outputFeatureClassName in the call to arcpy.CopyFeatures_management() , instead of just setting arcpy.env.workspace at the beginning of my code. Still experiencing this issue.

update #2 - In the SDE database, the field is named AREA. How do I prevent the alias from being created? None of the other fields have aliases of this form.

Answer 1

While you may not be able to prevent the alias from changing, you should be able to change it back easily enough with a few more lines of code. Say fc is your variable for the new feature class. Change the AREA field alias this way:

for field in arcpy.ListFields (fc):
    if field.name == "AREA":
        field.alias = "AREA"