Attributes and Object Text Disappear?

This morning I arrived to an email from one of our engineers that his module had been corrupted.  When I opened the module to investigate, I found that a large number of objects had lost their text and/or been changed to headers, as well as a number of headers that had lost their text.  At first glance, I assumed I could just copy and paste the text back in where necessary, but after a bit I realized that a number of attributes (not just columns but the actual module attributes) had also just "disappeared".

This particular module was created by archiving and then restoring it from another project into it's current project (long story - no sense in trying to explain it). This caused the module to lose its out-links, so I believe the engineers were using the Link by Attribute feature to restore those links.  I personally have not done any work inside the module since the day I created it, so admittedly, I really don't know what may have been done to it since that time.

Could Link by Attribute be what caused the "corruption" of the module?  Has anyone ever seen a module do this before (most of the long-time users here can't recall ever having seen it)?

Re: Attributes and Object Text Disappear?
llandale - Thu May 22 16:06:50 EDT 2014

I'd try these:

• I'd check History.  Do you see various deletes?
• Restore that same *.dma elsewhere, and look directly at that module
• Check access-rights.  in v95 the module is restored completely "inherited", and perhaps it is inheriting poor rights from the parent folder.
• Log in as the "Administrator" and take a look at hit.  Maybe YOU lack read-writes ..err.. rights.  This is also where you see all History.

-Louie

Re: Attributes and Object Text Disappear?
RoobyDooby - Fri May 30 13:40:27 EDT 2014

Thanks for the reply Louie.

We use v9.3 and I'm set up as a Database Manger user, with admin rights to the project/module.  There's no sign of deletion history (at least in relation to the missing data).  I had our Administrator look into it, and he could see no indicators for the deletions either.

As part of the process to get the engineers back to work, I renamed the "corrupt" module (as I wanted to keep it for investigative purposes), and restored a new copy of the module using same .dma I had previously created. The newly created (restored) module is intact, so I don't believe the archive/restore process is the culprit.  They were using the module for some time (before the "corruption" occurred) with no issues; which is what leads me to believe that it was some action on their part that caused it to go wonky.

Based on what I've been told by the engineers, the only work they had been doing in the module since I originally restored it was re-establishing out-links to the next-higher level module. This particular module has a fairly large number of objects, so I'm almost certain they tried to find some way to speed up the linking process (as opposed to creating links one at a time); which led me to believe that they probably were trying to Link by Attribute or some other process (possibly DXL), but I haven't received a denial/confirmation from them as to what they actually did.

I'm more interested at this point in trying to identify a root cause for the unintended modifications in the hope that should it occur again in the future, I might be able to "fix it", rather than just starting over.