I have a gdb featurewriter that passes through to a shp featurewriter. For attributes with names at the 10 character limit, the shp writer is using their _alias field to populate instead of the correct one.
Example: ASSETCLASS field is being filled with 'Asset Class', instead of 'Rail'.
Is there a way around this besides adding in and attribute removed for each of the Feature Types?
I did a bit of research on this and found out that field aliases can only be saved in the data source when using the Geodatabase format.
Field aliases can be exported/written to another Geodatabase, but not to a Shapefile. Rather, when using Shapefiles, the field alias is saved to the .mxd file (using ArcGIS for example). Unfortunately, this appears to be a limitation of the Shapefile format as it has no way to store the alias in the .dbf file.
More information can be found on the following threads:
Understanding Field Properties, aliases, and table display options