SharePoint recreating .xpr & lost transform scenarios?

[april_m]

We have a working connection between SharePoint and Oxygen. We have both opened the project (.xpr) from SharePoint so we can both access the project's transformation scenarios.

However, some of our custom transform scenarios have suddenly disappeared for an unknown reason. We are not able to find them in Oxygen and we have not changed anything with the .xpr.

Upon investigation, it appears there are tons of .xpr in the SharePoint Recycle Bin. I've attached a screenshot showing just a small sample of the files from the Recycle Bin.

xprrecreation.PNG

The logic behind when these .xpr are created/deleted is unknown to us. It does not correlate with when we are saving topic files. We are just opening Oxygen and working off of the files through the SharePoint Browser view. There were some transform scenario files in the recycle bin, but there was no change to the .xpr at the time those files were dumped.

We do periodically get these popup messages, but even these messages do not correlate with all of the recreations in the recycle bin:

The file (Hardware.xpr) has been changed on the file system.
Do you want to reload the file content from disk?

Old size: 158,898 bytes
Old modification time: 2019-11-01 09:35:18

New size: 165,910 bytes
New modification time: 2019-11-01 09:46:06

Are these "recreated" .xpr files the expected behavior? If not, what do we need to fix so we can both work off of the same project via SharePoint? Are we misunderstanding how the .xpr works?

We are not sure if the missing transforms are related to the recreated .xpr file, but how can we get those back, or prevent this from happening in the future?

[adrian]

Hi,

Sharing the the .xpr file via SharePoint between several users that open it concurrently isn't really a supported Oxygen use case. Oxygen doesn't know that you're doing that.
The problem is that Oxygen frequently writes (automatically) to the .xpr file whenever the user makes various (even minor) project changes. That's why you see "a ton" of xpr files in the SharePoint Recycle Bin. If two or more users use the same .xpr file, this gets amplified even more.
The missing transformation scenarios are most likely because one user (1) added them and the .xpr got written to SharePoint and the other (2) got a warning that the .xpr file was modified on disk and was asked to load the modified .xpr file, but did not load the .xpr with the new scenarios. When the other (2) made a project change, the .xpr got overwritten and the scenarios of the first user got lost.

It's simply not possible to share the project .xpr file via SharePoint. Each user must have a separate copy of the file.

Regards,
Adrian

[april_m]

Thank you for the reply. We have gotten control over the .xpr refresh rate now, but we must be misunderstanding how the project works. We assumed the point of the .xpr is so we could both access the same transform scenarios and project settings. In our case, only one of us is customizing the transform scenarios, but the other person needs access to those transform scenarios. What do we need to do differently so that we are both in the same "project", theoretically, but have separate .xpr files?

[adrian]

We assumed the point of the .xpr is so we could both access the same transform scenarios and project settings.

Yes, that is correct, but concurrently using the exact same .xpr file by multiple users is not possible.

In our case, only one of us is customizing the transform scenarios, but the other person needs access to those transform scenarios. What do we need to do differently so that we are both in the same "project", theoretically, but have separate .xpr files?

Either:

• each person has a copy of the .xpr file obtained from a version control system (SVN Git, etc)

or

• you use the .xpr in turns (Checkout, use, Check-in or Discard checkout) This is also possible with SharePoint.

Regards,
Adrian

[april_m]

Thank you, Adrian. We have separate copies of the .xpr now.

[Radu]

Hi April,

There are indeed settings which are saved very often to the project XPR files and our end users right now have no way to decide if the settings should be saved or not at project level. We do have plans to add separate settings to control this so in the future you will be able to control exactly what settings are saved at project level. We will update this forum thread when this will become possible.

Regards,
Radu