Inconsistencies in Field type enumerations are stupid

[kimo]

When I do a Describe on a field in a featureclass to be able to create a foreign key in a new table you would think that the terms would match those required in AddField but they don't and the alternatives are not accepted in the tool.

'SmallInteger' has to change to 'SHORT' and so on.
The only way is to make up a special dictionary as a workaround

eg dFixTypeHack = {'SmallInteger": 'SHORT',..}

[foresterguy]

I feel your frustration and share your 'angry face'

[Stringtheory]

I agree. I've had to write a bunch of extra code to test for and set the proper item definitions, it's annoying.

[ruckc]

Just another example of ESRI doing the minimum possible, never taking that extra step.

[g3martin]

Not impressed.

[NobbirAhmed]

If you have ArcGIS 10.0 or 10.1 then you don't need to worry about keeping a dictionary. I'm on 10.0 and this code works:

dsc = arcpy.Describe(infc)

fields = dsc.fields

for field in fields:
    print field.name, field.type
    arcpy.AddField_management(infc2, field.name, field.type)

Although the print statement shows the field type to be SmallInteger - internally it is made consistent with Short type.