To start I will say I used the update cursor and some dicts to hold values to be used in the update cursor to solve the problem... Problem solved with different approach!
I would, however, like to understand what went wrong in this code below.
I did a select by location on a polygon layer to clip a polyline layer. I wanted to move attributes from the polygon layer to the subsequent clipped polyline layers. I figured that a search cursor on the polygon layer for each row as I do the clip would let me call a calculatefield on the polyline clipped layers for each loop of the search cursor of the polygon layer. It would work sometimes and sometimes not but would never hit my print statements (maybe once it did). When I commented out the calculatefield calls and let the overall code run all my print statements would get hit.
My thought was that calling a calculatefield inside of a search cursor loop (even if the calculate field was not being done against the layer that the search cursor was working on but instead against the newly created clipped layer). As I said, it would give me results sometimes and sometimes not. Maybe this will help some else.
Here is the broken code...let me know if anyone wants to see the update cursor and dicts code that worked..
gp.makefeaturelayer(r"path\to\school.shp", "schl")
gp.selectlayerbylocation("schl", "intersect", r"path\to\layer to clip")
scur = gp.searchcursor("schl")
row1 = scur.reset()
row1 = scur.next()
while row1:
v = str(random.randint(1, 100000))
name1 = row1.name
print name1
feat1 = row1.shape
print feat1.area
gp.clip_analysis(twline, feat1, wkschool + "\\" + v)
gp.addfield_management(wkschool + "\\" + v + ".shp", "ISDName", "text", "#", "#", "100")
gp.calculatefield_management(wkschool + "\\" + v + ".shp", "ISDName", "str(name1)" , "Python_9.3")
row1 = scur.next()
del scur
