topic Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3 in Geoprocessing Questions

Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DuncanHornby — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:20:06 GMT

All,

I want to confirm with the user community that I have found a bug or is it some behaviour I have misunderstood? I have upgraded to 10.4. I have a toolbox created in 10.4 with a single script tool. So I have wired up a python script and exposed it as a tool and everything runs fine. If I choose Save As and save the toolbox to 10.3 (or any other earlier version) it creates a toolbox but it does not show the script tool inside. According to Windows Explorer the tbx files are exactly the same size as shown below:

Is there a bug in 10.4 that is not allowing it to save backwardly? If so this is show stopper as no one can share anything!

Interestingly if the toolbox includes a model then I can view that in a earlier version but not a script tool.

The official help file page "Saving toolboxes to earlier versions" gives no indication that script tools are treated differently so this is why I wonder if it is bug?

Duncan

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DanPatterson_Retired — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:46:08 GMT

So I take it, you have embedded the script in the 10.4 toolbox and then trying to save it to a previous version.

So, saving toolbox in a previous version isn't carrying the script over?

Embedding scripts and password protecting tools—Sharing geoprocessing workflows | ArcGIS for Desktop

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DuncanHornby — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 11:02:59 GMT

Dan,

No the script is not embedded it's external. I have just tried to embed the script and Save As a 10.3 toolbox and this still does not work. I get a toolbox with nothing more than my model, I see no Script Tool.

Duncan

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DanPatterson_Retired — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 12:39:07 GMT

I just did it in 10.3.1 and save back to 10.2 and the toolboxes are the exact same size as well. I keep my scripts relative to the location of the toolbox either in a folder beneath or in the same folder as the toolbox. So if you script isn't showing and you have the same setup, then it is a bug. The first is for 10.3.1 and the second is for 10.2 even though the toolbox labels are the same, since I didn't want to relabel it.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DuncanHornby — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 13:26:18 GMT

I can confirm that the paths are relative and the script is in a sub-folder called scripts, you can see it in the image in my original post. So it sounds very much like a bug in 10.4

Thanks for your help.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DanPatterson_Retired — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 13:31:56 GMT

And your script doesn't show as in my example, when it is loaded back into arctoolbox??? That is what I was showing, not a catalog view, but what it should look like in toolbox. And you can run and older version in the newer, just no the other way around.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DuncanHornby — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 13:41:49 GMT

Yeah older 10.3 script tools in their toolboxes are all visible and can be executed in 10.4. When I Save As from 10.4 to 10.3 I cannot see them, I see no classic script icon in the toolbox when viewed in Catalog panel, despite the toolbox being exactly the same size when I check it in Windows Explorer.

I have fired this off as a bug to ESRI UK.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DuncanHornby — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 10:44:00 GMT

With some help from ESRI UK I've come to the conclusion that this problem is not with 10.4 but some corruption of the toolbox which is causing problems when I Save As. How, when, why, who and what has corrupted it I don't know but I can confirm that if I create a new toolbox in 10.4 and then save to an earlier version I can see the script tool.

I would have deleted this thread but it seems I cannot do this.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DanPatterson_Retired — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 10:52:03 GMT

knowing something that is not a bug is as important as knowing something is

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DuncanHornby — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 10:56:58 GMT

Very Zen!

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DavidWasserman — Sat, 21 May 2016 22:25:11 GMT

I know this is a resolved thread, but I recently had this problem too. When ever I try to back save my 10.4 toolbox, 3 of the 4 tools I had disappear. Do you have any advice on moving the tools to a new TBX?

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DanPatterson_Retired — Sat, 21 May 2016 23:06:42 GMT

create the toolbox and copy ... but I usually go up the tree when creating toolboxes or use the save as option to get an older version, thenn on occasion, I have to fiddle on an older version machine. There hasn't been much in the way of changes except for the movement to PRO which provides a nice creation interface

Toolbox creation in ArcGIS Pro

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

curtvprice — Sun, 22 May 2016 04:33:08 GMT

David - I'm wondering if your tool naming is causing this problem -- it looks like these tools are similarly named. You may want to try renaming your tools (not the captions - the tools) so that they don't all start with the same characters and see if that behaves better.

Of course this is the kind of thing that should be logged w support if it is easily reproduced.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DavidWasserman — Sun, 22 May 2016 04:54:03 GMT

Curtis, actually renaming the tool name (internal, not the label) is how I got it to work in model builder again. Does the label and name need to start with a different letter? Thanks this does seem like something I should check more. I currently cannot save to 10.3 still even with the changes, but I have not tried changing the labels or altering the first letter.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

curtvprice — Sun, 22 May 2016 06:07:45 GMT

I'm wondering if the tool names may be not unique enough to be differentiated when the toolbox is converted.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

curtvprice — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 23:28:28 GMT

Just heard from Esri support on this. Known bug in 10.4, fixed in 10.5!

BUG-000095717: A model containing certain tools, including any tools in the Analysis > Overlay toolset and the Unsplit Line and Feature to Line (Data Management) tools, created in ArcMap 10.4 toolbox and saved to a previous version toolbox disappears.] this Bug has been fixed in 10.5 but you can track in on the My Esri site under the Support tab.

They had a workaround though. Although 10.5 is coming very soon, some of us are stuck at old versions for a long time so here it is. This is good as Pro can be installed alongside any version of Desktop. I tried this with a problematic toolbox a user gave me using Pro 1.3.1 and the workaround works!

The current workaround is to save the toolbox to a previous version using ArcGIS Pro.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DavidWasserman — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 23:36:13 GMT

While this is helpful to know, I am not sure I used those tools in these tool boxes BUT I did use the line geometry class extensively. Could that also be an issue?

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

curtvprice — Sat, 08 Oct 2016 01:21:42 GMT

I'm pretty sure this has to do with complex binary and text data that is kind of tricky to back port. Fortunately they got this fixed at 10.5 (any week now!)

In general if you really want to support multiple versions I recommend developing in the old version, things are tested throughly forward, so for example, I have 9.3 toolboxes with models and scripts that work fine at 10.4.

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

DanPatterson_Retired — Sat, 08 Oct 2016 01:26:41 GMT

Any ETA on the enhancements list? and/or fixed list?

Re: Saving a toolbox from 10.4 to 10.3

curtvprice — Sat, 08 Oct 2016 02:57:11 GMT

Nothing yet. I'm sure it's coming soon.