A few oddball issues have come up while working in ArcCatalog that I am listing here. These are aspects of the ArcGIS environment that have caused mysterious errors that took a while to troubleshoot. I will add more issues to this page as I come across them.
- If your metadata file is named metadata.xml, Arc does not show it in the catalog list. It is essentially invisible. If you change the name to something else, it will appear.
- If you use secure linkages in your metadata (https), Arc will not export the link into an ISO standards file. (see this blog post)
- If your folder name begins with a number, and you run a batch script with the folder as the environment workspace, it may report that the items are not iterable. Change the name of the folder to fix this error.
- If you run the Upgrade metadata tool on a standalone XML file, you might lose metadata - particularly the spatial coordinates (see this blog post)