Paths, Paths, and Longer Paths...

Oh those pesky long paths and filenames...

It seems I had a brain lock and had forgotten how picky ArcGIS can be with paths and filenames.  I must have been having a bad day, because I can usually sleuth these things out, but alas, it was my IT department that was successful in resolving the problems I was having.  So needless to say, I was a little embarrassed that I missed this obvious one.

What were the problems you ask?

arc_invalid_raster_2Well, I found that I could not preview some GRID data in ArcCatalog.  I didn't think that was a big deal as I’ve come across this on occasion and haven’t thought much about it.

 

 

arc_invalid_rasterThat was until I went to add this raster GRID to a map and ArcMap reported 'Invalid raster dataset' 

Huh?  What's going on?

To make a long story short, the path was too long...  If you create a mapped location to a shorter path and voila!  The preview works and I was able to add the GRID to a map.

Now, besides being extremely frustrating, this was a time consuming, resource wasting and costly process to determine the cause.  It's obvious that ESRI some has pretty talented developers by the innovative products they’ve created.  That said, why couldn't an appropriate error message be displayed instead of 'invalid data'?  I don't know, maybe something like ‘The selected file path is too long', or ‘The file path and/or name contains invalid characters'.

I don't know about you, but when I see a software application report 'invalid data' I presume the worst...  but in this case it was a simple issue...  if only the software could have told me how simple it was...

Until next time,
Take care

Warren M

Comments

Unknown said…
If you are looking to sove the problem of copying or moving long path file, then try Long Path Tool.
October 21, 2013 at 4:30 AM
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