Toolbox Doctor for tbx files

[curtvprice]

Sometimes tbx files can become unreadable, or sometimes you are stuck with a tbx created with another version of ArcGIS -- but you don't know what version you need to open it.

It would be great if there were a Toolbox Doctor utility (like MXD Doctor) to recover, repair, or just sniff toolboxes to help the user access un-onpenable tbx files (for example, report app and version used to create the toolbox).

It doesn't have to be perfect - MXD Doctor can't always make things whole, but at least it is a huge help when things go wrong!

Possible to repair ArcGIS 10.1 Toolbox?‌

Report Toolbox (.tbx) version info and warning‌

Edit a model does not open Model Builder‌

Model Builder‌

[DanPatterson_Retired]

It would even be sweeter if the tbx were in ascii so they could be edited like the old *.apr files

[DuncanHornby]

This is a great idea, I have fallen foul to toolbox corruption between different versions of ArcMap especially if they have a script tool which you have spent time and effort creating a well documented interface (via it's Item Description) .

[DrewFlater]

These concerns about the tbx format are heard and acknowledged. The binary format of tbx means that there are opportunities for persistence streams to become corrupt while saving changes into the tbx, and these corrupted binary streams are almost always unrecoverable. There are not tools that can be used to understand problems related to toolbox corruption or unexpected things like the toolbox having empty contents.

For these reasons and more, a new toolbox format, atbx, has been developed and Pro 3.0+ uses this new format by default. The atbx format is a zip archive containing json and other text files that define the toolbox properties, and tools inside the toolbox. The atbx format is less likely to become corrupt. If you encounter a corrupt atbx, you can extract the contents like a zip file, copy and paste the files and folders inside the extracted directory into a new folder, and re-archive as a zip then rename to atbx. This may help you recreate a new toolbox from the contents of a broken atbx.

At this time there is no plan for a public utility or process for fixing or retrieving content from corrupt or broken toolboxes, in either the tbx or atbx format. But we are taking steps to make the atbx format and its specification more public and interoperable with other systems, and it is infinitely more able to be recovered than tbx due to the new storage format.

[Bud]

Thanks for the info @DrewFlater. Very helpful.