topic database field names being shorten in ArcPad Questions

database field names being shorten

RebeccaBleney — Fri, 21 May 2010 22:21:29 GMT

Hi Everyone

I've created an acrpad file which has three combo boxes and three databases connected. I've got the second and third combo boxes getting their field names from the first. I work excatly how I want until the field name have more then 10 letters.

The databases are excel file converted to dbf no 4, which start out as small letters, text. The field were made text orginally in ArcCat. After I run the script they have been changed to Capitals and been cut off after 10 letters. The fields then don't match so the drop downs don't work.

Does anyone knows if this is a problem with excel or arcpad? Can it be fixed by a bit of scripting?

Rebecca

Re: database field names being shorten

NenadPetrovic — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:27:44 GMT

Hi,

Shapefiles (that is, DBF files for attributes) have a maximum of ten characters per field. This is a limitation of shapefiles. Have you thought about exporting your data from a geodatabase (personal, file or enterprise) to an AXF and using this in your mobile ArcPad application?

See the "Data Storage" section in this link for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile#Data_storage

Data storage
The maximum size of either .shp or .dbf component files cannot exceed 2 GB (or 231 bits). This translates to, at best, about 70 million point features.[3] The maximum number of feature storage for other geometry types varies depending on the number of vertices used.

The attribute database format for the .dbf component file is based on an older dBase standard. This database format inherently has many limitations, including:[3]

Incapable of storing null values (this is a serious issue for quantitative data, as it may skew representation and statistics as null quantities are often represented with 0)
Poor support for Unicode field names or field storage
Maximum length of field names is 10 characters
Maximum number of fields is 255
Supported field types are: floating point (13 character storage), integer (4 or 9 character storage), date (no time storage; 8 character storage), and text (maximum 254 character storage)
Floating point numbers may contain rounding errors since they are stored as text

Re: database field names being shorten

RebeccaBleney — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:01:40 GMT

Thank you for telling me that I thought I was doing something wrong which is not unnormal.

When I started doing this for someone else, I orginally was using a geodatabase and was planning to use domains and subsets. But decided that wasn't going to work ( which could be a wrong decision I basically an arcmap user trying to be a designer or programmer or something, I'm just way over my head.) They've got about a hundred different plant genesis to go into one field. As I said I've got the three combo boxes working the way they waited except for the shorten of the field name. I'm also not sure what you mean for me to try, to actually put the field names into the geodatabase properties or just put the database into the geodatabase file.

Rebecca

Re: database field names being shorten

RebeccaBleney — Sat, 29 May 2010 04:03:02 GMT

I remember why I stopped using geodatabases. I can't get Arcpad Studio to see the shapefiles inside a geodatabase and I wanted to use Studio.

Rebecca