Throw an error when an imported file doesn't adhere to naming conventions

ReneeRigdon — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 17:22:27 GMT

Yesterday I was trying to do a very simple join -- a DBF file to a county shapefile. The join would be successful (or so I thought -- I wasn't warned otherwise), but if I tried to open the attribute table, apply symbology, or do pretty much anything else, ArcMap crashed. I was on the phone with customer support for a half hour. The representative was very friendly and helpful, but it was determined that I needed to reinstall ArcMap to fix the crashing issue.

After an hour or so for the reinstall and reboot (which, of course, caused me to lose all my customizations), I tried to do the join again and...ArcMap crashed. Again.

As a last-ditch effort, I decided to try a different name for my DBF file. It was called 2016.dbf. I changed it to n2016.dbf, and voila -- no crashing, and ArcMap worked normally.

If ArcMap could have simply thrown an error when I tried to join a DBF file that began with a number (or contained any violation of its mysterious naming conventions) it would have saved a lot of my time, a lot of the customer service representative's time, and I wouldn't have lost all my customizations from the reinstall.

Re: Throw an error when an imported file doesn't adhere to naming conventions

KoryKramer — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:44:22 GMT

Thank you for submitting the idea, Renee Rigdon‌. While this is documented in a technical article:FAQ: What characters should not be used in ArcGIS for field names and table names? I can see that providing an explicit error message would be helpful. The idea is reviewed and open for voting.

idea Throw an error when an imported file doesn't adhere to naming conventions in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Throw an error when an imported file doesn't adhere to naming conventions

Re: Throw an error when an imported file doesn't adhere to naming conventions