Spatial join drops values from fields in ArcCatalog

Question

I'm running ArcEditor 10.0 SP5 with the Spatial Join patch installed. I am aware that spatial joins tend to fail on larger datasets, so I have two polygon feature classes with about 700 features each. When I use Spatial Join from the toolbox in ArcMap (with join features HAVE_THEIR_CENTRE_IN target features, keep only matching), my output contains 600 features, with the attributes from my join features nicely associated with my target features, as expected.

I perform the same operation, using the same data, in ArcCatalog, and it decided to NULL some of my fields from the join features. Note I said some - before I installed the patch and SP4, doing the spatial join in Catalog would result in the output having the correct number of matches and all the attributes from the target features, while all the attributes of the join features would be null. After patching, roughly half the attributes from the join features are NULL, so it did improve somewhat.

I'd like to know if anyone else has been having this problem after patching, because as I run all my models in Catalog, I now have had to split one of my models in half, run the first part, open ArcMap, do the Spatial Join, and then carry on in Catalog.

Answer 1

If you have fields with the same name in both the target and join features e.g. fc1.field1 and fc2.field1, ArcCatalog will rename it the same as in ArcMap (normally by appending _1). The difference is that where ArcMap will automatically map field1 from fc2 to field1_1, ArcCatalog does not, which is why that field will now only have null values, even if you set the field mapping yourself. I renamed the fields in the field mapping info (by changing it to field1_fc2) and all the values were present in the output.