topic JoinField General Function Failure in Python Questions

JoinField General Function Failure

DavidSchoenholzer — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 05:49:33 GMT

Hi there,

I am having an issue with the arcpy.JoinField_management() function. Most of the time (but NOT always), it fails in several of my scripts, although it is structurally no different than example 2 in ArcGIS help: that is, a feature class and a table, both imported into a geodatabase, and the JoinField used to join the table to the feature class.

The error I get is:
arcgisscripting.ExecuteError: ERROR 999999: Error executing function.
General function failure [featureclassname]
Failed to execute (JoinField).

looking into the script of the function, the exact point of failure is:

    try:
        retval = convertArcObjectToPythonObject(gp.JoinField_management(*gp_fixargs((in_data, in_field, join_table, join_field, fields), True)))
        return retval
    except Exception, e:
        raise e

What can I do to solve this problem? My impression is that it's a cache/memory issue, since it doesn't always fail. Is there a way to clear memory in arcpy?

Any help would be appreciated - I've been struggling with this for weeks. I'm happy to provide more code or data if that's useful to explain the problem.

Thanks,
David

Re: JoinField General Function Failure

DavidSchoenholzer — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 20:37:54 GMT

Dear ESRI,

please take care of this problem or tell me where the mistake on my side is. This is forcing me to use GIS solutions in Matlab, which means I might discontinue my usage of your product. Merging tables to one another is a fundamental feature of any data management software, so there is no way ArcGIS can be used without.

Best,
David

Re: JoinField General Function Failure

JessicaMitchell — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 17:40:03 GMT

Dear ESRI,

please take care of this problem or tell me where the mistake on my side is. This is forcing me to use GIS solutions in Matlab, which means I might discontinue my usage of your product. Merging tables to one another is a fundamental feature of any data management software, so there is no way ArcGIS can be used without.

Best,
David

I am interested in an answer as well. I teach an Intro to GIS course where we are unable to complete a spatial join and save to a new *.mdg (using the Join GUI).

JJM