Bringing a handle to Error 999999

By Kory Kramer | Customer Advocacy Lead – Desktop

We’re all familiar with Error 999999. And I’m pretty sure that no matter the language in which it is
presented, it causes similar frustration and angst for the end user.

What does this seemingly meaningless error mean anyway? Well, it means that something unexpected
caused the tool to fail. In other words, something happened that has caused me to not be able to do my
work, and the software isn’t smart enough to be able to provide any clues about what that something
might be. In slightly more technical terms, this is an unhandled exception, and yes, the software is
saying, “Hey, I don’t know what to say, so will just lob this 999999 atchya and hope for the best!”

So one way to think of an Error 999999 is like a shovel without a handle – it’s “unhandled.” Maybe you
can do something with it, but it isn’t all that useful.

Starting at ArcGIS Pro 2.2,

wording was added to the Error
999999 message that directs
users to contact Esri Technical
Support to report the
issue. With ArcGIS Pro 2.3 (Q1
2019), the wording will be
updated to refer to the issue as
a bug and will read: "Error 999999: Something unexpected caused the tool to fail. Contact Esri Technical
Support http://esriurl.com/support to Report a Bug, and refer to the error help for potential solutions or
workarounds."

Why the change? Simply put, the development teams that work on tools that generate these
errors want to make them better. If there is an exception that is currently unhandled, they want to
examine it and understand if they can build in better handling which would provide our users with
improved error messaging. So instead of a 999999, you might end up with something like Error 160096:
The length of the value exceeds that of the field.

And that starts to look a

whole lot more useful:

Quick tip: Find more details for How to handle an Error 999999 case in the Analyst Knowledge
Article.