Problem with Join Field tool

[AveryBowron]

I've been using the Join Field tool to add two fields from a .dbf table that describe ownership groups (i.e. Weyerhaueser, etc) and group types (i.e. public, private, conservation, etc) to county-wide tax parcel features that are part of a personal geodatabase.  This worked fine for six counties, but for some reason I can't get the final county I'm working with to join properly.  The tool runs without any error messages, but the resulting table has NULL values in most (but not all) of its records.  This is partially expected (as the join table doesn't have a matching record for every record of the input table), but there are many records which should have joined, but did not, and ended up with a NULL value.  Neither the input nor the join tables had any records selected when I performed the join.

Any ideas on what could have caused this?

Thanks,
Avery Bowron

ArcGIS 10 ArcINFO student license
Windows 7

[MostafaFouly1]

Hey Abowron,

I have just got a question...does the 2 tables that you would like to perform the 'Join Field Tool' on has matching number of records? if the input table has more records than the join table then you will get null values...simply because yet the IDs did match but the records in the join one is not enough for filling the Input table.

Fouly.

[AveryBowron]

Yeah, I know that.  Many of the NULL values were expected for that reason.  However, a number of the records that did have matches also failed to join, and that's what I'm trying to figure out since the tool didn't provide an error message and some of them joined properly.  Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my original post.

[MostafaFouly1]

Hey Avery,

Actually that sounds weird but if it's a serious issue at your side and you still didn't find a solution for it may be we can find some time so as to check what happening at your side remotely!

Grtz,
Fouly.

[StevePeaslee]

Avery,

If some records join and some don't, I would examine the values in the join field a little more closely. Assuming that your join field is character, the most common problem I've run into are things like leading spaces or some other character that doesn't display. Those can be hard to spot when looking at the tables. Sometimes I've resorted to copying a pasting field values into Notepad where I can read them easier.


-Steve

[ChristopherBlinn1]

Avery,

I am having a very similar issue.  Did you ever find a solution to this?  I have tried multiple workarounds but none seem to work.

-Chris

[JeremyJurick]

I have experienced problems with 'Join Field' as well.  I was using this tool to join two tables that were in separate geodatabases.  The tool would run to completion but about 15 of the 215,000+ records showed up as null, even though I could successfully join them in ArcMap.

I imported both tables into a the same file geodatabase and reran 'Join Field' and it worked as it should.

[ShitijMehta]

Hello All,

Our developers are looking into the joined fields with Null values problem. We will inform you in a day or two.

[ShitijMehta]

Hello abowron,
Hello jeremyjurick,

Can any one of you please share a subset of your data? This would make it easy for us to find the problem and suggest a solution.

Thanks!

[EricMoody]

Just ran into a similar issue... Tried using the Join Field Tool on a table in a fGD to feature class, same number of records (6585) in each, same data type (text) and had 1100 records not join... Tried it thru ArcMap and everything worked just fine...