matching up fields in different tables

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05-01-2014 05:59 AM
DanaBissey
New Contributor
Hello,

I am going to attempt to explain my problem, and hopefully someone out there will have some insight/solutions/work arounds.

I work for a University, and we have some utility/site people go out with their GPS and shoot points pretty often when there are new projects, construction, etc.  The data dictionary that they have created has some field names that are longer than 10 characters, so when they export to shapefiles, the fields are being cut off to only contain the allowed limit.  Once they bring in the shapefile into our existing base map, they copy and then paste the new items into the existing sde feature class, the data that is contained in the truncated fields won't copy.  So, then they have to go in and redo some of the fields that didn't copy over.  I know that fields have to match between tables in order to copy/paste data, but is there some kind of script, code, or work around that can match up these fields?  I was hoping that there is some kind of field name match.  for example, something that i could use to say that create_dat from the gps export file would equal create_date in the existing feature class.

I hope that I made some sense in trying to explain this.  Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.  I have attached an image of both tables and what data will and won't copy over.

Thanks in advance!
Dana
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RichardFairhurst
MVP Honored Contributor
Use the Append tool with the NO_TEST option and modify the field map to match up the field names between the sources.  That does what you want.  If the table view of the feature class you are inserting records into is open, close and reopen it to see the appended records, because the table view cache does not refresh otherwise (at least for me).
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