Topic: Too Many Resources to open in Project Professional 2013
Author:  Brian Smith (Microsoft) — Thanks Brian for sharing this blog.

This is an issue that limits how many resources you can successfully open in Project Professional 2013 by selecting them in the Project Web App (PWA) Resource Center and clicking Open in the ribbon.  I know a few of my readers have already hit this one – and it will happen with Project Online as well as an on-premise installation of Project Server 2013.  It will also happen with any browser – but with slightly different results.

*** Update 4/19 – I should also mention another ‘bug’ here – that until you select at least one resource then you cannot open the resource pool in Project Professional (for example to add additional resource) – the message you will get is “Action can’t be performed because Office doesn’t recognize the command given” – so the only workaround is to select at least one resource then all will work. Thanks to Rob Jones for the reminder to publicize this scenario.  On with the original post… ***

So for example – if you are using Internet Explorer 10 and in your Resource Center you select all your resources (and you have 520+) and then you click Open on the ribbon – nothing will happen…

If you reduce the selection to around 500 then it will work just fine, and your resources will be opened as expected in Project Professional 2013 (assuming you have it installed!).  If you are using Internet Explorer 9 then the issue occurs at a lower resource count – around 120 or so (and I have seen it throw up an ‘about : blank’ page)  At the time of writing I was using IE 10 Version 10.0.9200.16484, and IE 9 version 9.0.8112.16421.

The numbers are not exact, as they will depend on the length of your PWA Url, and also the specific resources selected – and the failure when we use Google Chrome gives us a clue to the limitation.  The same action when using Chrome (25.0.1364.160 at the time of writing) gives this pop-up – and the Launch Application will then fail to do anything…

Firefox (at the time of writing 19.0.2) will appear to work – and you will see your resources opened in Project Professional 2013 – but only the first 510 or so.  The remainder are not opened.

*** Update 3/11 – I should also point out that the other ‘supported’ browser, Safari, does not work at all in this scenario on the PC – even with single resource – and of course on the Mac it wouldn’t be expected to work as Project Professional 2013 is not available on that platform ***

The limitation here appears to be the length of the Uri going to the protocol handler – and we get the clue from Chrome – the ms-project|u|http://brismith2013/pwa|g|…. etc.  It looks like IE 9 is hitting a 512 character limit – which gets me about 119 resources in my environment – and the other browsers are limited to 2048 – around the 502 to 520 mark.

For now the only workaround is to open in groups of less than 500 (or 120 in IE9).  Hopefully this isn’t too much of an inconvenience, but I do appreciate it can be useful when making a change to RBS or adding new resource level custom fields to be able to open all at once.  We have a bug logged on this one – but it doesn’t feel like an easy one to resolve.

For more information – contact us at:  https://ppmworks.com/contact

For the complete MSFT TechNet Article:  http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2013/03/11/project-server-2013-why-can-t-i-open-all-my-resources-from-the-resource-center.aspx

Project Server 2013, Resource, Error

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