Deleting phatom project

[Dan Keen]

In our Project Server 2003 environment, I've come across a phatom project
that shows up in PWA (Project Center) but can't be brought up in Project Pro.
The error I'm getting is "Project Server was unable to find the specific
project. Check the project name and version. If the problem continues,
contact your server administrator."

When I tried using the Clean Up Project Server DB function, the project
shows up in the list, but it has no version listed, and I get a message
stating that "An error ocurred while completing the operation.", but there's
no information in the application logs. I also tried using the PSCleaner
utility, but the project does not show up in that list.

I checked the tables, and the particular project ID is not present in the
MSP_PROJECTS table, but shows up in the MSP_WEB_PROJECTS table. Based on
what I've read in other posts on this topic, it sounds like I'm going to have
to do some SQL queries to remove rows from the MSP_WEB tables for this
particular WPROJ_ID. Can I remove the entry from just the MSP_WEB_PROJECTS
table? It seems like this would leave a lot of orphaned data, which I'm
afraid may show up in other views in PWA.

I saw a post that mentioned that there were some scripts posted that would
help with the delete process, but I have not been able to locate a post that
contains them. This particular project does not have any actuals posted
against it, so it appears safe to delete, but I want to make sure I'm not
opening up the Gateway to Hell in doing so.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Al]

Have you used the project renamer tool at all prior to recognizing the
phantom project?

 

[Dee]

Hi Dan,

Do you see that project ID in any other tables (Web Assignment etc)?
I've had 2 instances of this issue. Once I jsut removed the entry from
MSP_Web_Projects and it worked fine. I could not find this Project ID
in any other tables. But in the second instance, initiall I removed
from MSP_WEB_PROJ but it failed the OLAP build (I forget the error). So
next day I went in and removed any reference of that Proj ID in all
tables.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Dee

 

[Spunky]

When renaming a project using the renamer tool I cannot open it from PWA into
MS Project until I first open it directly from MS Project and save it.
Otherwise I get the message you indicated. After saving it I can go back to
PWA select it and it opens like I would expect.

 

[Dan Keen]

I've used the ProjectRenamer tool before, and it's worked well, but I don't
think it was involved here. In this case, the project in question does not
show up on the list of available projects when I run the renamer tool.

 

[Dan Keen]

Dee,

Yes, the project ID does show up in other tables. I did a random check, and
I'm seeing it in the MSP_WEB tables, but not in the MSP_ tables, so it seems
to me that the project was somehow deleted incorrectly after it had been
published. Deleting references to that project ID seems pretty tedious, but
maybe there's no other way around it. I was hoping that someone may have
come up with some scripts to do this kind of cleanup, but I haven't found any
yet.

Thanks for the help.

Dan

 

[Al]

Yes this is what I was referring to. I had to edit the 0 Task Summary name
each time in my instance. Tool>Options>Summary Task to show the 0 Task. Look
a the naming convention on this line item. It should match the file you
opened. If there is a .Published at the end of Task 0 remove this as well.
This is what worked for me.