Cannot Delete SDE Feature Attachments

[LeviCecil]

I have a script that exports and renames photo attachments from an sde feature class. I need to delete the existing attachments each time the script runs, but I can't get it to work. I've tried arcpy.RemoveAttachments_management and del Attachment, but they persist. 

[DanPatterson]

Are you getting errors? or is it a permissions thing?

Did you try the alternate method described in the Usage section?

Remove Attachments (Data Management)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

[LeviCecil]

Hi Dan,

I did not get any errors. Here is what I tried when the remove attachment tool didn't work. This also did not work:

attach_table = 'CustodianInspection__ATTACH'

##Step 1 -Search the atttachment table and export as jpegs with REL_GUID in filename

with da.SearchCursor(attach_table, ['DATA', 'ATT_NAME', 'REL_GLOBALID']) as cursor:
    
    for item in cursor:
        attachment = item[0]
        file_GUID = "GUID_" + str(item[2])
        filename = file_GUID + str(item[1])
        open(temp_dir + os.sep + filename, 'wb').write(attachment.tobytes())

        del item
        del attachment

[DanPatterson]

It looks like you are writing out the the attachment (?) to a file during the process.  

From what I can't tell is whether you want to actually delete a file that is used as an attachment.  All you are doing in that script is deleting the reference to the name.  I would suspect that you have to delete using the "os" module

[LeviCecil]

Hey Dan,

Yes, we're exporting the attachments daily to files in directories by site and date taken. What I want to do is clear out the attachment table each time the script runs. Otherwise I'm rewriting these every time the script runs and there are new photo attachments. 

[JohannesLindner · Accepted solution]

If you only want to delete the attachments, but keep the features they are attached to:

attach_table = 'CustodianInspection__ATTACH'

##Step 1 -Search the atttachment table and export as jpegs with REL_GUID in filename

## Use UpdateCursor instead of SearchCursor
with da.UpdateCursor(attach_table, ['DATA', 'ATT_NAME', 'REL_GLOBALID']) as cursor:
    
    for item in cursor:
        attachment = item[0]
        file_GUID = "GUID_" + str(item[2])
        filename = file_GUID + str(item[1])
        open(temp_dir + os.sep + filename, 'wb').write(attachment.tobytes())

        cursor.deleteRow()  # Delete this attachment

        del item
        del attachment

If you don't need the features whose attachments you have exported, you can just delete the features and the attachments are deleted automatically.

[LeviCecil]

That did the trick, thank you! We want to keep the features, as these attachments are pictures of rooms taken by custodians to keep track of issues.