"Project Center cannot access the project(s)" message.

[Chris_M]

Hi,

I hope someone can point me in the right direction with a problem that we
are having with PWA in Project Server 2007, connected to SQL 2005.

Evereything has been running fine with our setup until a couple of days ago.
All of a sudden whenever we go into Project Center or into any project
workspace, we just get the usual "Project Center cannot access the project(s)
you are trying to view." error message. This is happening for all users on
all projects. Other things seem OK though. The cube is building, the queue is
processing jobs and the backups are still running. It just seems to be having
problems displaying task and project summaries. I'm not great with SQL so
could this be some kind of SQL timeout error.

I hope someone can point me in the right direction because this is driving
me nuts.

Thanks, Chris.

 

[Gary Chefetz]

Chris:

Yes it could be SQL timeout issue. Does your SQL maintenance plan include
updating statistics on a periodic basis? Did you make any changes right
before this started happening like adding a new custom field or changing
security configuration. There are many possible causes for this.

 

[Chris_M]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for this. I made sure that I ran the maintenance schedule this
weekend, which includes updating statistics, but this hasn't helped anything.
I didn't make any changes to Project before this happened so I can rule that
one out as well. Do you have any more ideas on anything else I should check?

Thanks, Chris.

 

[Gary Chefetz]

Really hard to tell what might be happening. You should eliminate the
possibility that someone changed something in the security configuration.
Does this happen with all views? Do you still have any of the built-in views
unaltered? If so, can you apply them? Have you checked the ULS logs to see
what is happening when you try to apply the views?

 

[Jonathan Sofer [MVP]]

Hey Chris,

I have heard of this issue being caused by someone with the correct access
rights attempting to make and ODBC connection to the Project Sever 2007
databases. See Brian Smith's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brismith/arch...ect-professional-2003-to-a-2007-database.aspx

To identify whether this is the issue, check your Published database to see
if you have an MSP_TASKS table with 130 columns compared to the expected
128. The extra columns would be:
TASK_ACT_WORK_PROT
TASK_ACT_OVT_WORK_PROT

As Brian says, recovery is reasonably painless, the extra columns can be
deleted, and then things will go back to normal. Your Project Center views
should start working again.

Let me us know if this was the case and if you were able to fix the issue.

Jonathan Sofer