Help with (lots of) file paths after a server move?

[MurrayBrady]

Hello, I really hope you can help me with this.

I'm new to my job and none of us know what is happening with the ArcView-based GIS we have here that has basically been mothballed for 3 years due to the recession. The guy that developed it has since left the company. We're getting it back online now and because of the server move all of the filenames that the layers refer to have changed.

Rather than go through a few hundred sites manually, pointing the features in the table of contents to the data, is there an easier way to do this? Maybe using ArcCatalog? I realise that allowing 'relative' file paths should help with this but it's not on at the moment and when I switch it on it doesn't make a difference even if I point a couple of the layers to the correct location.

Please help guys, if you can I will give you 50 points and lots of thanks! i did an MSc in GIS and Cartography and it's not helping at the moment!

Thanks in advance,

Murray

[MichaelVolz]

Murray:

I have had to deal with this problem in the past (used VBA which is going away) and I will need to deal with it again in the future which I am using python to automate the process.

If you can provide a more detailed picture of your situation, I could provide a starter script that you could test to update your file paths.

Where does the data originate from (e.g. shapefiles, personal geodatabases, file geodatabases)?

Very important, what version of ArcView (ArcGIS Desktop) are you using?  Python in version 10 has a good deal more built-in functionality to get this job done.