What creates duplicate projects and how to clean them up?

[Ton Ensink]

Who knows what causes the creation of duplicate projects in Project 2002? I
thought this issue was resolved, but apparently exporting a project to XLS
or saving a project
as HTML still creates a duplicate view in the list of projects.

While deleting one of the duplicates, my whole project seemed to have
disappeared. Microsoft describes this phenomenon nowhere nor is this issue
documented very well.

Who can shine a light on this?

Ton Ensink
Crystal Decicions

[Brian K - Project MVP]

So you have verified that exporting to excel or saving to a webpage creates a
dup. project in the database? Please post the steps to reproduce this issue and
I will make sure it gets to the right people at MS.
--
Brian K
MS Project MVP
________________________
Project Specialist
QuantumPM
http://www.quantumpm.com

[Ton Ensink]

[Brian K - Project MVP]

Please post the exact steps to take to create this duplicate Project. I have
not seen these things cause this problem but if you have please let me see the
steps you take so I can get the info to the right people at MS.

Thanks

[Gary Chefetz [MVP]]

Tom:

The vulnerability seems to be using Save As, some other file type, and
before closing and exiting out of the Project, taking an additional publish
action. When publishing, always work with one project at a time and avoid
using Save As during the same session in which you are publishing project
information.

--
Gary Chefetz [MVP]

*** Remember to look for line breaks in links posted to the news group, use
cut and paste for these.

"Ton Ensink" <ton.e...@crystaldecisions.com> wrote in message
news:ecWKBvnwCHA.2796@TK2MSFTNGP12...

[Brian K - Project MVP]

I just did some testing here and here is what I found.

If you do a File | Save As on a published project you should immediately close
the project and DO NOT SAVE the changes! If you do then a second project is
created. If you add tasks or assignments to the project between the time that
you did the File | Save As an the time you close the project (and save changes)
these new tasks and assignments will show up on timesheets under the 'new'
project.

To Recap:

IF YOU PERFORM A FILE | SAVE AS ON A PUBLISHED PROJECT:

MAKE SURE YOU SAVE THE PLAN JUST BEFORE YOU DO THE FILE | SAVE AS.

AFTER THE SAVE AS CLOSE THE PROJECT AND SAY NO TO THE DIALOG THAT ASKS IF YOU
WANT TO SAVE CHANGES.

I will be talking to the Project group about this issue on Monday morning.

[Terrie Sauvain]

We have also had cases where a duplicate project id error
is logged in the application log. An additional project
is published to the Project Server with a new web project
id and points back to the same project id that another
web project id points to. Not sure why this happens but
it has occurred when using Project 2002 and doing the
Project Server Updates. We have also noticed that temp
files get created on the project managers hard drive.
These files start with mspj... and have a mtm extension.
The published project is referencing the temp file name
and cannot be viewed in Project Server. There have been
other cases where the mspj is not created but an
additional project is still published. I have had to
manually go into the tables and null out the project id
in the Web Projects table so that I can use Project
Server Admin to delete the project that got published.
In addition, the msp_view_service_publish_status table
was updated. I deleted out these entries since they were
not being removed. What exactly is this table used for?
I could not find it in my documentation.

Some insight would be greatly appreciated.
Terrie

>.
>

[Patricio Fernandes]

>.
>

In my organization i have the same problem. I have may
projects but some of them have duplicates.

Who can help us ?

[David Steinke]

I'm copying a post I made a while ago. This might help. I've used it
successfully several times.

*** HOWEVER, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK ***

I'd recommend having the dba make a backup of your database first, just to
be safe. You should also safe the project to a file as a backup and exit
project before doing this.

======================================
For some time now, I have had one PM that consistently gets duplicate web
projects and problems accepting updates on the server. Up until now, the
only way I had around it was to save the project to file, delete it from the
server and import it again. Doing this, individuals working on the project
would not be able to see previously entered times in the timesheet.

Based on information posted by Marcin, David, and Christine, (see "Change
project name - solution") I was able to 'successfully' recover from a
duplicate web project situation.

Setting the Stage:
The PM had two projects that he and another person submitted updates to.
When he tried to accept the updates, everything appeared to go OK (no
blatant system errors) except that the tasks remained in the update page and
on the users tasks page with the indicator saying that the tasks hadn't been
saved. After publishing the projects, duplicate web projects occurred.

Here's what I did.

1. Located the duplicate web project record in table MSP_WEB_PROJECTS.
2. Copied to the clipboard (or notepad) the field
MSP_WEB_PROJECTS.PROJ_TIMESTAMP.
3. Deleted the duplicate web project record
4. Pasted the copied field value into the original
MSP_WEB_PROJECTS.PROJ_TIMESTAMP field.
5. Went to the table MSP_WEB_ASSIGNMENTS and deleted all records which
matched the duplicate web project id (field WPROJ_ID).
6. The PM used the web client to accept the updated tasks, project by
project, and it worked.
7. The PM re-published all assignments and no duplicate web project
appeared.
8. User timesheets maintained all of their information

DISCLAIMER
I am sharing this information in hopes that it might help someone. USE AT
YOUR OWN RISK!!! There are still some clean-up issues that I haven't
addressed, for example the duplicate sharepoint site, etc. and there may be
other orphaned records in other tables that I missed (MSP_WEB_WORK??).
Please note that I hate directly modifying the database this way. I made
sure no one was using the system and did a full database backup before
attempting this.

I still don't know why duplicates are being created. The PM isn't
performing the known causes of this problem.

Hope this helps someone,

David Steinke

"David Steinke" <dste...@texas.net> wrote in message
news:OpWQ$8ivCHA.2492@TK2MSFTNGP10...
> Thank you for the information Al. We will institute that policy as well.
>
> We are also having a problem were the same PM can't accept updated time
from
> resourses. This is on a different project. It appears to go through the
> accept process ok but the tasks then remain in the PM's update page. Any
> ideas on what might cause that? We've had this problem before and the
only
> way we found to get around it was to save the project as a file, delete
the
> project in server and then re-import the project.
>
> Thanks,
> -David Steinke
>
> "Al Sussman" <asus...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:eHkmYkbvCHA.1632@TK2MSFTNGP12...
> > I discovered at least one way that duplicate projects are posted to
> resource
> > timesheets.
> >
> > This happened in a project pro 2002/project server environment. All
> > projects are stored in SQL Server.
> >
> > If the project manager has more than one project open at a time when
> sending
> > out updates, what appear to be duplicate projects and their
corresponding
> > assignments are created. It didn't seem to mess up time reporting, but
it
> > was very annoying to project resources and hardly instilled confidence
in
> > the new system. At the time, I took the very heavy-handed approach of
> just
> > deleting both "duplicate" projects through database cleanup because we
> > weren't very far into production, we had the reported time saved in
> > spreadsheets, and we just rekeyed the time.
> >
> > So the simple rule I've given my project managers is "DON'T HAVE MORE
THAN
> > ONE PROJECT OPEN AT A TIME WHEN YOU ARE PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS, OR
> UPDATING
> > PROJECT SERVER". One more reason why master projects are probably a
thing
> > of the past.
> >
> > This is a frustrating problem to see in the product given the fact that
> > something similar to this was a well-known bug in Project Central.
> >
> > Al
> >
>
>
>

"Patricio Fernandes" <patricio....@primaverasoft.pt> wrote in message
news:051101c2d440$9c50ed60$3301...@phx.gbl...

[Michael]

To all experiencing this,

This is a known issue. MS is already aware of it and have a hotfix
available. You do have to burn a support call to get it. They also
have a KB article on the way(Q812639). You will get error 457 when
trying to build an OLAP cube due to this problem as well. Here is the
response on what to do straight from MS support:

SYMPTOMS
========

When you launch Project Web Access and select "Project" on the menu,
existing projects may appear duplicated.

Also, the following error may occur when building the Online
Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube:

The cube scheduled to be built on 10/30/2002 at 8:57 AM failed. (457)
This key is already associated with an element of this collection

Note the time and date in the error message will reflect the date and
time of your server.

CAUSE
=====

This can occur if you perform a "Save As" on an enterprise project to
a non-connected format (such as mdb, xls, txt, etc.) and then
republish the project. A duplicate entry for that project is created
in the MSP_WEB_PROJECTS table, causing the project to appear twice.
However, the project will appear with each use of "Save As".

The resolution is the hotfix. That will prevent this from happening in
the future by preventing duplicates from being created. The
instructions for deleting the existing duplicate projects are:

1. Log in to Project Web Access as an administrator
2. Select "Clean up Microsoft Project Server database"
3. Select the radio button next to Projects, click the check box for
the subweb 4. Select one of the duplicate project files and click
Delete button. 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for the second project file
name 6. Republish the project plan from with the backup of the plan
from Microsoft Project Professional.

Hope this helps,

Michael
"David Steinke" <dste...@texas.net> wrote in message news:<#oKm4h81CHA.1264@TK2MSFTNGP09>...