I experienced a rather worrying crash upon opening an MXD that had data driven pages setup. The MXD had a layer driving the mapbook that had a definition query to filter only certain pages and also had page definition queries set up for several layers to display only matching records of a different unique ID field.
Turned out I had opened a different MXD that used the same data driven setup, same Layer and same unique field, but had changed the unique field contents from a simple ‘yes’ to ‘priority site’. When I opened the other MXD it crashed automatically, presumably because its definition query and/or page definition queries were looking for records in the mapbook layer that contained the value ‘yes’ and could find none.
To solve the issue I had to copy the mxd to a subfolder in Windows Explorer, which broke the relative path links, remove the definition query on the mapbook layer, relink all the data sources and update the definition query to find the ‘priority site’ records.
I’m not sure if this is a repeatable crash, but be wary of changing definition query values that may impact other MXDs. Anyone else experience this issue?
