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Hi Everyone,

I attempt to create a new work space in FME Desktop 2018 and add a reader to read .shp file. However, I wasn't able to create the reader and saw the following error:

"Failed to obtain any schemas from reader 'ESRISHAPE' from 1 datasets. This may be due to invalid datasets or format accessibility issues due to licensing, dependencies, or module loading. See logfile for more information"

Can some one please point me to where I can resolve this issue? Which components are the culprit in this case? I've ArcGIS and ArcGIS Background Geoprocessing installed as well.

Thank you for looking into this

Does this happen for all shapefiles you try to read or only for a specific one?

If it happens for all files it might mean something is wrong with your installation. I doubt ArcGIS and the background geoprocessing are the cause of it, the regular shapefile reader does not rely on any external components. I would recommend trying to reinstall FME first (maybe upgrade to 2019 if you have the opportunity)


This really happens to all shape files that we try. It works fine on a different environment with the same FME version and architecture.

This is the full error message :

"BADNEWS: Shape Reader: Failed to open dataset 'E:/Shape_Test/S_FIRM_PAN.shp' which is neither an existing file nor directory (shapread.cpp:538)

Shape Reader: Failed to open dataset 'E:/Shape_Test/S_FIRM_PAN.shp' which is neither an existing file nor directory

Read 0 schema features from dataset #1 of 1 (E:/Shape_Test/S_FIRM_PAN.shp)

BADNEWS: Failed to obtain any schemas from reader 'ESRISHAPE' from 1 datasets. This may be due to invalid datasets or format accessibility issues due to licensing, dependencies, or module loading. See logfile for more information (contfile.cpp:850)

Failed to obtain any schemas from reader 'ESRISHAPE' from 1 datasets. This may be due to invalid datasets or format accessibility issues due to licensing, dependencies, or module loading. See logfile for more information"

I'll try to repair the installation


A Shapefile dataset consists of at least three files ( *.shp, *.shx, *.dbf) with the same root name, and missing *.dbf causes the error. Firstly make sure that the source Shapefile dataset has all the required files.


Just to clarify, I just recheck and FME has been able to open other shape files. This happens because the one I use to test has issues, I wasn't aware of it because I've use ArcMap to open the file and it works just fine. In addition, all the files within the dataset was not working so I had assumed that this issue is across the board.

Thank you so much for giving your advice. This is no longer an issue.


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