Displaying dynamic text in Data Driven Pages from joined MS Access database table?

Question

I'm running ArcMap 10.4 and trying to incorporate text from a joined MS Access 2013 table (through an OLE DB connection) as a dynamic text element in a data driven pages setup. Adding dynamic text from those fields returns "[empty]," even though I can label from those fields and run symbology from those fields. When I export my Access table to Excel and join that instead, dynamic text from those fields works splendidly. I have tried the usual "tablename.fieldname" workarounds and the such to no avail. I've attached a screenshot of the attribute table (with a few fields cropped and/or blurred for confidentiality and size). It's PropertyAddress that I'm attempting to make a dynamic text block for.

The ESRI help specifically says, "this includes fields joined to the index layer," but I'm just not able to make that happen when the fields are joined from Access. Is this a deficiency in ArcMap or have I missed an important memo somewhere?

Answer 1

For any interested parties: I contacted ESRI tech support, who confirmed this is a known bug which was first reported, and subsequently shelved, approximately two years ago.

Workarounds are to re-export the OLE-joined table to a new feature class and use that as your data-driven pages layer, or to export the OLE-joined data to a different format (e.g. Excel), and join the data from the other format to your data-driven pages layer. The major drawback is that both of those workarounds lose your live link to the the database, so any changes that are made in your database are not reflected in your dynamic text like they are for labeling and symbology. A third workaround is to script your dynamic text and export pipelines through python or VB, which allows you to keep that link to the database, if only scriptually (scriptically?).

Tech support indicated that the development team was reconsidering this bug to be resolved in a future release.