Error 000229 when trying to Clip

[GIS1]

Hi friends,

I am experiencing a weird issue. We have a layer that seems fine. It is visible in our map and we are able to manipulate it in many ways. However, when trying to clip it out given a shapefile, we get the following error:


Error 000229 Cannot open blah blah blah

The ESRI help is not very helpful on this:
http://help.arcgis.com/EN/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//00vp00000005000229.htm

Obviously, the data exists, we can see it on our map. Furthermore, performing the same clip on a different computer works just fine. It's just this one computer that seems to be experiencing this issue.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[MikeLintott]

Same error here while exporting to CAD.
Anybody?

[GIS1]

Getting this again, totally different computer and set of data. Error message and documentation is of no help trying to figure this one out...

[RichardSlater1]

I'm getting this same error except when trying to merge datasets. It's very annoying and can't find any explanation for it. The data is added to arcmap, displays without issue and appears in the drop down list of the tool, but as soon as you run the tool it gives the error 000229. After the tool has failed, when ticking the layers on and off I get the red exclamation mark signalling a broken data link, but the source location is as it should be.

I managed to get the merge to work by exporting the datasets into a new gdb. Any ideas what the problem is though? Are the files corrupted in some way and are there other ways to resolve it?

[MattSidor]

I'm having the same problem with the Dissolve tool on a polygon feature class. Incredibly frustrating. ArcGIS Help files, as usual, provide no troubleshooting steps.

[BrendanJackson]

I was also having problems with this- I got the error message when trying to do an Erase. 

After some playing around, I discovered that it had something to do with one of the features being in a file geodatabase, and the other a regular shapefile in a folder.  I found that either importing the shapefile into the geodatabase, or exporting the geodatabase feature to a shapefile fixed the error.

[BrentBrock]

Add me to the users frustrated with this error. I've been plagued by it ever since upgrading to 10.1. I'm seeing it with pretty much any of the analysis tools (clip, erase, dissolve...).  All inputs are shapefiles so I'm not seeing the same geodatabase issues as others. But it seems to have something to do with the way layers in the TOC are passed to tools. If you try to drag a layer from the TOC into the tool and it doesn't work, then you know you will get the error. But browsing to the shapefile on the file system instead of trying to input a TOC layer works. The other thing that works is to close and reopen the map doc, after which the tools work again for a little while and then stops again.  Both work arounds are frustrating but at least browsing directly to the sources saves time over constantly restarting the mdx.

[RandyMcGregor]

Include me among the EXTREMELY frustrated. Also, I think it is new with 10.1.  I'm getting it a LOT, when the layer is perfectly valid and points to a perfectly valid data source. I just sent a support request regarding it. In my particular situation (today), I'm getting it when rerunning results, but not when running the tool directly.

[RandyMcGregor]

I believe 10.1 has serious problems with feature layers.

Another issue I'm having is that if you move a layer from one data frame to another, tools do NOT work on it at all, the claim being that the layer does not exist. It is trying to access the layer in the data frame from which you copied the layer and since that frame isn't the active one, it can't access THAT layer. This I think is quite reproducible. When I move a data layer to a different data frame, I HAVE to rename it.

Also, and this is a very old problem that I had hoped would be fixed by now. If you have, say, three layers with the same name (I know...  you shouldn't) and pick the third one as input into the tool, the tool process the first layer with that name. Not a bug, but something that reflects a certain, shall we say, lack of sophistication regarding the relationship between a particular layer and its associated data on disk.

[RandyMcGregor]

One more message.

This topic is very dear to my heart.

In some (all?!) cases, restarting the mxd makes it go away.

For awhile...