Symptoms

  • Attempting to use a Geodatabase format in FME  results in the following error message in the logfile:

"Unable to perform any licensing related tasks. Please ensure that ArcGIS Desktop/Engine Runtime is correctly installed"

  • FME for ArcGIS fails to license

The FME log message looks something like:
INFORM|The Esri Product license used by this machine does not include licenses for the 'ArcInfo' licensing level
ERROR |Unable to perform licensing related tasks. Please ensure that ArcGIS is correctly installed

Cause

In FME 2010 SP2 the licensing checkout routines were changed to support ArcGIS 10. If there are a number of ArcGIS products installed on the client and some of these are unlicensed but ArcGIS Desktop is licensed, FME can get confused as to which product/license combination to use.

The same error may also occur if your ArcGIS isn't licensed correctly, your ArcGIS license has expired or license server is not available.

Resolution

Use the ArcGIS Administrator application to check the availability of ArcGIS licenses.

If you need to specifiy a particular type of license, there is a workaround where the user can set an environment variable to tell FME to use ArcGIS Desktop instead of ArcGIS Server:

DI_APPLICATION_CONTEXT = DESKTOP