Customer Derived Trade Areas Tool: The row contains a bad value.

[TylerSchwartz2]

Hello community,

I am trying to run the Customer Derived Trade Areas tool using the Business Analyst toolset.  Basically, I am trying to create a ring which contains 75% of the customer points around a given store location.  Simple to do.. usually.

I am getting the following error when I attempt to run the tool:

ERROR 080002: Failed to write results.;

Function: CConvexHullBuilder::Start;

Can't insert feature.;

Function: CConvexHullBuilder::WriteResult;

The row contains a bad value. [AREA_ID]

Failed to execute (Customer Derived Trade Areas).

The problem is, neither of my input features contains an [AREA_ID] field, so there is no way I can check to see what the "bad value" is because no such field exists in my input features.

The only thing I can think of is that there are fields in my input features that are used to create [AREA_ID] in the new output feature class, that have bad values. Unfortunately I dont know what those fields are, or why I am getting this error.

I have attached screenshots of the results window, of my model, and both of my input FC field names (showing there is no [AREA_ID] field in either of these). I am running ArcMap Desktop Basic 10.3.1. Any ideas?

[TylerSchwartz2 · Accepted solution]

Upon further digging, the tool asks to match your customers to your stores by specifying a matching field for each input (stores and customers).  I have these fields matched up so that the customers for store name kmart, have a field that says kmart, and my store input has the matching name for each store, so the two should hypothetically line up right?

It appears that these fields cannot be strings, and actually need to be matching integers (instead of "shopko" it should be 1, "kmart" =2, etc) in both your input features.  I am thinking the tool assigns [AREA_ID] based on these values (area 1, 2, 3 etc). My guess is that the error is because AREA_ID must be an integer and the tool is trying to assign a string to an integer field because I am using strings for my store assignment fields.

I think it would be more intuitive for the error message to have more detail (ie: "cannot assign string to integer field") or something similar so that people could understand these types of errors better... Or at least build functionality into the tool dialog so that people cant assign a string field to the "Store ID Field" (red X would be nice), and specifying that this field MUST be an integer...