Adding custom fields to PWA views causes error

B

Bill Mc

I'm still battling that error when trying to display projects via the Project
Center Views. I've done plenty of scenario testing over the past week trying
to get some consistencies to show up.

If I take a standard Project Center view, say "Task Detail" and I add a
enterprise custom column, then I get the error that I can't access the
project to be viewed. i could view the project with that Task Detail view
before i added the custom column. And it not just that custom column that
causes the error, but any enterprise custom column.

I'm using Project Server 2007. Some of my plans were originally created in
Project 2005 and were migrated to Project 2007 before loading into the server.
 
B

Bill Mc

Hi Gary. Thanks for the offer to help.

Here's a sample scenario;
1) I create a new custom project view that contains no custom fields, no
groupings, no filters. I go into Project Center, select a project, select
that view and all works as desired.

2) I add a custom field to that view. It doesn't matter what custom field,
it could be any of the enterprise custom fields that i created. For the sake
of testing, I choose a custom field for "revenue" which is a standard data
entered field, no formulas, no lookups. I save the view, go bck to Project
Center, select the project and view and I receive the following message.

"Project Center cannot access the project(s) you are trying to view. It is
most likely that you either don't have permissions to view the project,
another user has deleted this project(s) before you were able to view it or
that another user is in the process of publishing the project."

I do not get this error on all projects when accessing this view however,
only about half of them. There are no apparent similarities for projects
that get the error and projects that don't.




Bill McGrath PMP
 
G

Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]

Bill:

Still not enough to go on. Are you certain that you added the view to a
category and the projects have been published with values in the fields?

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
For Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
For Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com


Bill Mc said:
Hi Gary. Thanks for the offer to help.

Here's a sample scenario;
1) I create a new custom project view that contains no custom fields, no
groupings, no filters. I go into Project Center, select a project, select
that view and all works as desired.

2) I add a custom field to that view. It doesn't matter what custom
field,
it could be any of the enterprise custom fields that i created. For the
sake
of testing, I choose a custom field for "revenue" which is a standard data
entered field, no formulas, no lookups. I save the view, go bck to
Project
Center, select the project and view and I receive the following message.

"Project Center cannot access the project(s) you are trying to view. It is
most likely that you either don't have permissions to view the project,
another user has deleted this project(s) before you were able to view it
or
that another user is in the process of publishing the project."

I do not get this error on all projects when accessing this view however,
only about half of them. There are no apparent similarities for projects
that get the error and projects that don't.




Bill McGrath PMP
Click to expand...
 
B

Bill Mc

Hi Gary. Yes, the views have been added to the "My Organization" and "My
Projects" categories. And the projects have been published with values in
the custom fields.

I've been doing exhaustive testing trying to determine the conditions where
the error occurs and I've stumbled across that it's related to the result set
of the view. If I filter down the result set far enough, I can get the view
to display for the project. If I change the filter to allow more rows into
the result set, then it fails. I'm continuing testing to see if I can
determine an exact row where it fails.

Are the custom fields stored in a separate table in the database? I'm
thinking that maybe I'm hitting a data condition in one of these rows and
even if it's not displaying that exact custom field that the data condition
exists in, all views with custom fields that access that row fail?
 
G

Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]

Bill:

To be certain that you're not seeing ghosts, I suggest that you manually
delete the Project Pro cache on the machine you're working on, and do this
regularly as long as you are making changes to the Project Server
configuration.

In the Run Command box, type %appdata%
Navigate to the MS Project folder
Delete the folder underneath i

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
For Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
For Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com


Bill Mc said:
Hi Gary. Yes, the views have been added to the "My Organization" and "My
Projects" categories. And the projects have been published with values in
the custom fields.

I've been doing exhaustive testing trying to determine the conditions
where
the error occurs and I've stumbled across that it's related to the result
set
of the view. If I filter down the result set far enough, I can get the
view
to display for the project. If I change the filter to allow more rows
into
the result set, then it fails. I'm continuing testing to see if I can
determine an exact row where it fails.

Are the custom fields stored in a separate table in the database? I'm
thinking that maybe I'm hitting a data condition in one of these rows and
even if it's not displaying that exact custom field that the data
condition
exists in, all views with custom fields that access that row fail?
Click to expand...
 
B

Bill Mc

Gary,

I'm not sure about ghosts but my installation certainly seems "haunted". I
was so hopeful on this suggestion but alas, I'm still getting the errors. I
cleared my Project Pro Cache as you listed, by deleting the contents of the
"Cache" folder under MS Project. Your message seems to have gotten cut off
so if I need to delete more, please let me know. I then opened a project
that has encountered the errors, hit F9 to refresh just in case, then saved
and published the project. But as i said, when trying to open the custom
views in PWA, i still get the error message.
 
G

Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]

Bill:

I'm at a loss, as I can't reproduce this behavior on my systems. If you
learn more, please post it.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
For Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
For Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com


Bill Mc said:
Gary,

I'm not sure about ghosts but my installation certainly seems "haunted".
I
was so hopeful on this suggestion but alas, I'm still getting the errors.
I
cleared my Project Pro Cache as you listed, by deleting the contents of
the
"Cache" folder under MS Project. Your message seems to have gotten cut
off
so if I need to delete more, please let me know. I then opened a project
that has encountered the errors, hit F9 to refresh just in case, then
saved
and published the project. But as i said, when trying to open the custom
views in PWA, i still get the error message.
Click to expand...
 
B

Bill Mc

Gary,
I think I might be onto something. I went back to the basics and created a
new custom view by copying the "Task Work" view. i then added a custom
column to it and it failed with the project i selected. I then tried
different filter criteria and got the view to work with certain filters. I
was filtering by "work > xxx". I now believe that the error is not
"data-related" but "data volume related". If the result set for the view is
above a certain (unknown) threshold, the view fails. I think that the error
might actually be coming from SQL and the message I'm getting is the only one
that Project Server knows to assign to it. Since the errors are only
occuring when i add custom fileds, I'm guessing that the join between the
base table and the custom field table must be violating some internal SQL
threshold. Now to determine what that might be. Do you know how I can debug
this within the database? To answer your last question which falls within
this logic, yes, it's the larger projects that I'm seeing the error on. the
one I've done most of the testing with this morning was 800 tasks. i also
have about 20 custom enterprise fields defined.
 
G

Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]

Bill:

There are known issues with large projects, although I'm not personally "in
the know" about all of them. What you're seeing may be a bug or at least the
reslults of one or more "issues." I don't know if it's worth your time
delving into this further, however, if you have a support contract with
Microsoft, it might be worthwhile to open a case.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
For Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
For Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
 
G

Gerard Wojcik

Bill and Gary – I am very familiar with this view error. We have had a
similar experience. In our case, we believe that this view error is a
“general error†returned as result of the view page timing out. The problem
here impacts only certain schedules on this site which contain a large amount
of field values. We ran a database trace which revealed a long running SQL
when the Project Center view is accessed. What we have found is that the
problem goes away once we have updated the database statistics for the
Published project database. You or your DBA might want to try updating the
index statistics for the Published project database via the sp_updatestats
stored procedure. You may also want to check for a database server
performance issue – environment or configuration.

I hope that this helps!
 
B

Bill Mc

Gerard,

Thank you very much. That fixed the problem. I'll put something in place
to run that procedure periodically. We're an oracle shop and this is ouor
only SQL Server DB so I'm flying blind here without a trained DBA.

Again, many thanks.
 
H

Harry Irvine

Gerard,
Also a big thank you from me on solving this issue. I had been beating my head against a wall on this one. We had a 1777 task line project that just wouldn't show any custom fields and had the same error Bill was showing. I had narrowed it down to the project size since I was able to modify the view with a filter (showing far fewer tasks)and it showed the custom field. By using the sp_updatestats proceedure, I can now show the whole thing unfiltered. It worked like a champ. Since it takes so little time to run (on our server it took 4 seconds), I plan on a regular SQL job to keep the statistics update. And THANKS AGIAN!


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