Need to understand desc.workspaceType to use in conditionals

Question

I need to differentiate between two possible types of workspaces for an arcpy script. So I check the workspaceType:

rootWorkspace = raw_input('Geodatabase workspace to analyze: ')
desc = arcpy.Describe(rootWorkspace)
wsType = desc.workspaceType
print 'Workspace Type: {}'.format(wsType)

which seems to work fine and prints the correct type. But, if I try to then check the type (so I can, eventually, do different things depending on what it is):

if wsType is 'FileSystem': print 'file system'
if wsType is 'LocalDatabase': print 'gdb'
if wsType is 'RemoteDatabase': print 'sde'
else: print 'not reading this correctly'

I always get not reading this correctly (whether I'm inputting a directory or geodatabase).

According to Arc help about Workspace properties, workspaceType should be a string result (not an Object etc.), so I am confused why a string comparison isn't working.

Answer 1

Try replacing "is" with "==" within the if statements. When I tested it (python 2.6) I used a local FGDB:

if wsType is 'LocalDatabase':
    print "True"
else:
    print "False"

The result here was False

if wsType =='LocalDatabase':
    print "True"
else:
    print "False"

The result here was True

The first bit of code checks if the object identity of "wsType" and 'LocalDatabase' is the same, whereas the second bit of code checks if the strings "wsType" and 'LocalDatabase' are equal.

Answer 2

The following changes to your script should work for you:

import arcpy

rootWorkspace = r'C:\Users\OWNER\Documents\ArcGIS\Default.gdb'
desc = arcpy.Describe(rootWorkspace)
wsType = desc.workspaceType
print 'Workspace Type: {}'.format(wsType)

if wsType == 'FileSystem':
    print 'file system'
elif wsType == 'LocalDatabase':
    print 'gdb'
elif wsType == 'RemoteDatabase':
    print 'sde'
else:
    print 'not reading this correctly'