Altium workspace opens with missing projects
After creating an Altium Designer 6.8 workspace last week and importing a dozen Protel schematic projects, I opened it again this morning to discover that all but one of my patiently imported projects had disappeared. The fix was surprisingly simple, making it even more frustrating that I had to spend my time working around a simple Altium oversight.
Opening the .DsnWrk workspace file in a text editor, I saw the following:
[ProjectGroup]
Version=1.0
[Project0]
ProjectPath=ProjectX\PCICard\PCICard.PrjPcb
[Project1]
ProjectPath=ProjectX\PCICard\SHIELDS\SHIELDS.PrjPcb
[Project3]
ProjectPath=ProjectX\DaughterBoard\DaughterBoard.PrjPcb
[Project4]
...
and so on to Project 12. Quite confident that Altium couldn't be so brain dead as to create a workspace file that it can't open, I nevertheless changed [Project0] to [Project1] and [Project1] to [Project2]. The change was prompted by the pattern I found in example workspaces that come with Altium - ie. the first project is "Project1" and additional projects are number sequentially. The result looked like this:
[ProjectGroup]
Version=1.0
[Project1]
ProjectPath=ProjectX\PCICard\PCICard.PrjPcb
[Project2]
ProjectPath=ProjectX\PCICard\SHIELDS\SHIELDS.PrjPcb
[Project3]
ProjectPath=ProjectX\DaughterBoard\DaughterBoard.PrjPcb
[Project4]
...
And whaddya know, after Altium's worryingly long launch process, the workspace opened and all 12 projects appeared once again. Yep, I'm sorry to report that Altium can create files that it can't open.