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

[DrewFlater]

I'm sorry you feel that way. 

We went back to the original NIMBUS bug case listed above and tested with the same data using new software versions (namely ArcGIS Pro), and the Join Field tool correctly joins all attribute values from the join table to the input table, without nulls. The only nulls are those which were already in the join table. If you have a case that still isn't working please upload it here or contact tech support.

The top table is the input to Join Field (a feature class), bottom table is the join table. All the joined fields in the top have values, except where the join table has pre-existing nulls.

[James_Whitacre]

I just had an issue with joins that aligns with this post, but I was able to figure it out. I will explain below; read bold text for quick issue and solution. I was using ArcGIS Pro 2.5.

I was trying to join data TO a standalone table FROM a geocoded feature class. I don't do this often, but I find it helpful when needing to geocode many records to cities/POI that have multiple duplicate geocoding locations in the data. By running Summary Statistics, I get unique locations and significantly save AGO credits when I geocode them (e.g. I had ~3.1 million records which cost ~124K credits - which I do not have - and reduced the locations to less than ~5,500 records at 220 credits, which I can manage!!). I then join the XY fields and map all original records the using the XY Table to Point tool. In theory, you can also use Make Query Table, but it isn't consistent either...and can be slow with larger datasets. This joining workflow seems to work better.

When I tried to join the data, using either the Add Join or the Join Field tools, it resulted in the joined fields from the geocoded FC to return <Null> for all values in the join fields. I think this should be allowed, so this may be a bug/issue for Esri to explore. My workaround was to convert the geocoded FC to a standalone table then join, and everything worked fine.

Hope this is helpful for this thread.

[curtvprice]

I highly recommend (plead with you really) to report the bug to Esri support. Reproducible user-reported bugs are the ones that get fixed.

[JurisZarins]

Still the same problem. After joining two tables (feature and table) in the same fGD no information in table, grayed menus and running circle in the corner. It seams that development is like a cycle. Arcview good and usable was from version 3.0. Maybe with ArcGIS PRO v. 3 will be the same.

[curtvprice]

Suggest patience (Join Field is fairly slow with large tables, and Pro runs all tools in the background so the application remains responsive) or do a dynamic join with Add Join followed by Copy Features (much faster).

If you still have a problem, I beg of you to contact Esri support, because believe it or not, that's how things get fixed, when people send real data to Esri that does not work. (Without 'real data' that fails, it is very hard for them to make progress improving quality.)

[NickJones7]

I'm still seeing problems with this as of 10.6.  I still have to use a numeric field for it to run as expected.