Why does OGR driver.Open() for File Geodatabase give AttributeError: NoneType object has no attribute Open?

Question

There are a number of existing Questions that hint at a possible Answer to this Question, but none seem to be providing me with the solution to my problem:

• How to access feature classes in file geodatabases with Python and GDAL?
• How to add GDAL to existing Python installation?
• Gdal Python Bindings and File Geodatabase API

To get GDAL/OGR 1.10 working on a Windows 7 SP1 (64bit) laptop with Python 2.7.3 from ArcGIS 10.2 for Desktop I did the following steps:

1. Installed ArcGIS 10.2 for Desktop which installed Python 2.7.3 - there are no other versions of Python present
2. Downloaded and installed gdal-110-1600-x64-core.msi (compiled 2/6/2014 6:11 AM) from http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk/PackageList.aspx?file=release-1600-x64-gdal-mapserver
3. Downloaded and installed gdal-110-1600-x64-filegdb.msi (compiled 2/6/2014 6:17 AM) from http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk/PackageList.aspx?file=release-1600-x64-gdal-mapserver. As expected this placed an ogr_FileGDB.dll in C:\Program Files\GDAL\gdalplugins.
4. Added a new system environment variable called GDAL_DRIVER_PATH and set it to C:\Program Files\GDAL\gdalplugins, and I appended (using ';') the same folder onto the end of my Path variable. This was from advice offered in one of the Questions cited above.
5. Downloaded and installed GDAL-1.10.1.win32-py2.7.exe from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#gdal

This enabled me to run some Python scripts from IDLE like the one below to count the number of features in a shapefile.

import os
from osgeo import ogr

daShapefile = r"C:\temp\test.shp"

driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('ESRI Shapefile')

dataSource = driver.Open(daShapefile, 0) # 0 means read-only. 1 means writeable.

# Check to see if shapefile is found.
if dataSource is None:
    print 'Could not open %s' % (daShapefile)
else:
    print 'Opened %s' % (daShapefile)
    layer = dataSource.GetLayer()
    featureCount = layer.GetFeatureCount()
    print "Number of features in %s: %d" % (os.path.basename(daShapefile),featureCount)

However, when I tried to run the code below:

import os
from osgeo import ogr

daFileGeodatabaseFC = r"C:\temp\test.gdb\testFC"
daFileGeodatabase = r"C:\temp\test.gdb"
featClass = "testFC"

driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('FileGDB')

dataSource = driver.Open(daFileGeodatabase, 0) # 0 means read-only. 1 means writeable.

# Check to see if feature class is found.
if dataSource is None:
    print 'Could not open %s' % (daFileGeodatabase)
else:
    print 'Opened %s' % (daFileGeodatabase)
    layer = dataSource.GetLayer(featClass)
    featureCount = layer.GetFeatureCount()
    print "Number of features in %s: %d" % (os.path.basename(daFileGeodatabaseFC),featureCount)

I got an error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\temp\GetFileGDBFeatureCount.py", line 17, in dataSource = driver.Open(daFileGeodatabase, 0) # 0 means read-only. 1 means writeable. AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'Open'

After some more reading I decided to use ogrinfo --formats in a DOS window to see if FileGDB was recognized and it is!

Am I missing a step or two that would complete enabling OGR FileGDB support for my GDAL/Python/ArcGIS configuration?

I do not class myself as a developer so compiling a new version of GDAL, or starting from scratch and installing OSGeo4W instead are options I would prefer to avoid, if at all possible.

Answer 1

These are a few things I noticed, your Python 2.7.3, installed with ArcGIS, is 32 bit while the filegdb plugin is 64 bit. You may need a 64 bit Python to match the filegdb driver. Also, you installed two versions of GDAL 32 bit & 64 bit, this might be ok. When you import osgeo, which version are you importing, 32 or 64? Your GDAL_DRIVER_PATH points to the 64 bit install, looks good.