Select Features grayed out in PythonAddins toolbar

Question

I've created a custom toolbar using the pythonaddins module. For ease of use I'd like to add the Select Features tool to the toolbar.

enter image description here

The tool becomes grayed out as soon as I close the Customize window however.

enter image description here

Note that the Select Features tool on the Tools toolbar works fine.

enter image description here

• Michael Stimson: Are no layers set to selectable? gis.stackexchange.com/questions/12927/… are you sure your active active data frame has selectable layers? Is the spatial reference set? In previous versions the selection was disabled if the spatial reference of the dataframe was set to unknown.
• Emil Brundage: @MichaelStimson That's not it. The Select Features tool on the Tools toolbar works fine.

Answer 1

Your problem is that you are adding an item that is not the same as the Select Features on the Tools toolbar. The Select Features from the Data View Context Menu is the tool that one can start once right-clicking in the data view.

What you are looking for is tools under Selection category:

enter image description here

Unfortunately, you won't be able to have the same drop-down menu of the tools to pick from (by lasso, polygon, line etc) because this is done by some custom ArcMap UI code that is not exposed through Customize menu.

The closest you can get is either to have just Select By Rectangle (which is the default for built-in Select Features group tool) or to add multiple selection types to the toolbar:

enter image description here