Enterprise Guide file empty

[jkurka]

I saved a SAS EG 7.1 file with years worth of information. Many Process Flows with dozens of program code files. The size of the EG file is 571 KB, but when I open the EG file it is empty except for the names of the Process Flows. Nothing else, none of the program codes or any other information is showing.

This has happened for both my primary working file and my backup file.

Is there a way to recover previous version?

Also, why is this happening??

[AlanC · Accepted solution]

If you change the extension to .zip, you can see the contents.

That is a massive project. I would suggest breaking it up somehow.

[jkurka]

I'm getting a prompt that if I change the extension the file might become unusable. Confirm, just change the extension from .egp to .zip in my windows File Explorer pane?

Yes, it is massive, which is why I preferred to have everything in one location with a backup. It makes it easier to work through.

[AlanC]

Ignore the warning or, make a copy of it and do the rename. The warning is a standard Windows thing.

[jkurka]

Thanks for the tip! This worked. I was also able to find an old version on dropbox to download, so not a total loss. Any ideas on why this happens?

[AlanC]

I am speculating here so bear with me. The EG guys can correct if I miss something.

EG is a .NET/C# app (I am a SAS and C# dev so I kind of know how this works). When you make changes to an EG project, it saves them to the in-memory object (classes). When you save, it has to serialize them to XML. When you open a project, it deserializes them back to the objects. Any time you are serializing a large object, it can go wrong. Shouldn't, but it can. depending on what happens in the I/O. Especially true over a network connection. I suspect something blipped in the serialization. 

You really need to make the project smaller. I have never seen an EG project of that size and I look at them a lot, especially in their raw form. I rarely use EG as an application, mainly deal with the EG zip file or making EG add-ins. If you have data stored in the project (which I suspect), move it elsewhere.  

[jkurka]

I don't have any data it in. Any data is imported for each session and any data I do save are saved in an external folder, referencing a libname. I have 30 sas program files distributed across 9 process flows.

[SASKiwi]

If you really want to make your EG project work super secure then it's well worth your while using EG's Git version control functionality - you'll probably need to upgrade to a later EG version to make best use of that. If anything gets corrupted you have a complete history of all previous changes to go back to. So you can track any change you've made as well as having secure backups in case anything goes pear-shaped.

[jkurka]

Thanks for the tip! I had a friend recommend this yesterday also. Will look into it!

[Achara]

How did you do after changing .egp to .zip?