Client machine having difficulty opening MXD's on shared drive?

[Anonymous User]

Original User: se2539

Got a call from a colleague that a client machine was having difficulty accessing saved MXD's on a shared network drive.  The machine could open the MXD's no problem, but would experience the dreaded red exclamation points for all the feature classes and tables that are located on the enterprise GDB. Right clicking and looking at the data source, something weird was definitely going on:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]30881[/ATTACH]

Note the ALL CAPS ... never seen that before when looking at the data source of an FC or Table.

Funny thing is, when one manually resets the data source (right click the FC/Table, goes to properties, "Set Data Source"), the layer works just fine. 



Here's a look at what a "working" feature class should look like when accessing from our database:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]30882[/ATTACH]

I should note that this is only occurring on only one client machine in an organization of about 7 or so machines.  Additionally, I should also point out that this organization received a CPU upgrade and software upgrade to ArcGIS 10.1 around the September 2013 time frame ... however, this particular problem has only occurred in the last week or so on the one machine in question.



This problem has really got me and my colleagues stumped ... we would really like to be able to open MXD's without having to repair every single path!

[Anonymous User]

Original User: crafty762

After looking at your screenshots for a while and comparing them, it seems to me that the difference in layer connection properties between them is a result of using two different versions of ArcGIS when creating the SDE connection files.  Parameters like AUTHENTICATION_MODE and DB_CLIENT are consistent with mid-9.x versions of ArcGIS whereas Database Platform is more consistent with ArcGIS 10.x versions of ArcGIS. 

When you repair the broken sources and save the map document, are you repairing those data sources with an older SDE connection file?  To keep things clean, I would suggest creating a new SDE connection file from ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 and then re-pathing all of the broken sources with that brand new connection file.  You might also want to perform a Save As for your map documents from ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 just in case you might still be using a 9.x map document without even knowing it.

[Anonymous User]

When you repair the broken sources and save the map document, are you repairing those data sources with an older SDE connection file?  Should be brand new 10.1 connection files ... we actually did a repair as well as a uninstall/reinstall of the software on the machine in question.

To keep things clean, I would suggest creating a new SDE connection file from ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 and then re-pathing all of the broken sources with that brand new connection file.  I could try this again ... in case I perhaps neglected to actually perform this task. 

You might also want to perform a Save As for your map documents from ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 just in case you might still be using a 9.x map document without even knowing it.  We tried this a few times ... if anything, they would save to a 10.0 document as that's what we migrated from in early fall of last year.  In fact, we haven't had 9.3.1 on any of the organization's machines since the summer of 2010.

You might be right, there could be something 9.3.1 still hanging ... hmmm

[Anonymous User]

Original User: mvolz47

I would agree with William Craft.  I am working on resourcing SDE connections as our database has been upgraded from 10g to 11g.  I was going to perform this upgrade at v10.0, but ran into some bugs.  This actually worked out as would have had to perform this operation twice due to the changes that were made to SDE connections between v10.0 and v10.1-10.2.

[Anonymous User]

This actually worked out as would have had to perform this operation twice due to the changes that were made to SDE connections between v10.0 and v10.1-10.2.

Can you elaborate on this?  I'm not sure I know what you mean by "perform this operation twice"

[Anonymous User]

Original User: mvolz47

If I had performed the operation in v10.0, it would have used v10.0 SDE connections which are different from v10.1-10.2 SDE connections.  One difference is that versions other than Default are not accessible in v10.2 if I am still using v10.0 SDE connections.  If I convert these v10.0 connections to v10.2 connections, then all versions are accessible in v10.2.

The ramifications of this problem would not be visible to most SDE users who only have view privileges to the Default version.  This is more problemmatic for SDE editors who make their edits in their own specific versions of SDE so they would never be able to create or access these versions.