Finding and Fixing Broken Paths in Map Documents

Owned by Cooper Labenske
Apr 08, 2022
2 min read

Voyager can identify broken links in map documents and can also fix them using the geoprocessing task Replace Data Source.  When many documents are missing the same data source, all of them can be fixed at once. 

Finding Maps with Broken Paths

You can find map documents with broken paths using a saved search:

  1. Select Saved on the main window

  2. Click Maps with Missing Data

When you have found the maps with incorrect data, use the Replace Data Source processing task to add correct links to the maps. For detailed information on this task, see Replace Data Source.

  1. Add the results of your search to the Processing Queue

  2. Follow the steps in Replace Data Source to open the task

  3. In the Replace Data Source dialog, enter the old, incorrect link above the new, correct link (you can Browse to either location as well)

  4. Click Run Task to replace the old links with the correct information

Usage Notes 

  • The input search results must be layer files or map documents.

  • By default, backups are created. Backups are created in the source location with a .bak extension.

RECOMMENDED

  • The data source will only be updated if the new data source path is a valid.

  • A data source can be the the full catalog path to the dataset or it can be a workspace path when updating only the workspace portion of data.

  • If the dataset names are identical when switching workspaces, only the workspace paths are necessary. For example, a shapefile called Highways.shp can be redirected to a file geodatabase workspace if the dataset name in the file geodatabase is also called Highways.

  • If dataset names are different, full paths to the data source is required. For example, c:\data\highways.shp can be redirected to c:\data\usa.gdb\us_highways.

Requires ArcGIS 10.x