File lock on EA project caused by WinCVS checkin

[dana n]

A colleague of mine is having trouble with an EA project file being locked. This occurred after checking in to WinCVS. Please help! If we can't recover the project, we'll have lost a lot of work.

Here's his email to me:

"The project file ... has become corrupted.  Some Strange Lock file appeared after we checked the project into CVS.  Now the file cannot be opened in EA. The following message appears when I try to open the file:

"An Error has Occurred: The Microsoft Jet database engine cannot opent the file <File Path>.  It is already opened exclusively by another user, or you need permission to view its data."

How can we recover the project? No other user has any hooks into the EA project file that we know of--we checked with any users who might have had knowledge of where the project file was located.

Seems like the very act of checking into CVS permanently created a lock on the local, pre-checked out copy; and this lock is now propagated to anyone checking out the project file from the server. We do not have an "unlocked" project file anywhere that we can rollback to; although I guess we could "roll tape" as a last resort.

Thanks.

Dana

[Frank Horn]

Don't know about CVS cause we're using SVN, but it's probably similar. You could simply use another CVS client (like Tortoise) to unlock the file.

[Kosmopolita]

Hi Dana,

try repairing eap file with MS Access (function "compact and repair"). It is in fact an access database and can be repaired in a same way as any other mdb file. But, it might not work anyway... :-/

(This is the reason we use shared repository on ms sql or oracle database - much more stable than ms jet. I strongly recommend that to your team as well.)

Good luck, Kosmo

[«Midnight»]

Dana,

Note that you can either repair or compact an EAP file directly from EA main menu via Tools | Manage EAP File. You have to have a project open to use this menu choice, though it does not have to be the one you want to repair or compact (in fact it probably has to be a different file). Yes this sounds strange, but that's just how EA works.

In any case this will avoid having to have MS Access installed. And it will also avoid having a recent version of MS Access unexpectedly saving the repaired database to a newer (and incompatible) version, which would cause EA to fail.

HTH, David

[dana n]

Thanks guys. Using EA's built-in "Compact" solved my problem. But I misspoke about what may have caused the real problem. My colleague checked a file into CVS from a network drive rather than a local drive. That may have caused the "lock" in the first place. WinCVS itself warns about committing and checking-in from a CVS Root that is a network drive. Checking in and committing from a loca drive is evidently the "more correct" thing to do.

[«Midnight»]

Thanks for posting back to let us all know the solution. The caution you point out could be easily missed by other teams. It will certainly come in useful down the line.

[dana n]

Thanks for posting back to let us all know the solution. The caution you point out could be easily missed by other teams. It will certainly come in useful down the line.

You're very welcome. It's the least I can do in return for the great help I've received here.