APRX Doctor

[MichaelKelly]

**This idea is being submitted on behalf of an Esri Ireland customer**

It would be great if there were an equivalent to MXD Doctor for ArcGIS Pro projects. As ArcGIS Pro projects can contain multiple maps and layouts, they can become quite complex in comparison to MXD Documents. Therefore, if an APRX becomes corrupted, you are likely to lose more work. An option to repair these would be very useful.

A 'Recovery Mode' like in Microsoft Office could also provide an alternative.

[LindaGreen]

I'll be the first to jump on this bandwagon in 2025.

We haven't had many aprx files get completely corrupted, but we do occasionally have files that get bloated (typically anything > 1mb will run poorly) and slow for no obvious reason. I'd understand the file size if these aprx files had a ton of maps or images in them, but they don't.

We currently have one slow aprx that's 1606kb and has seven maps and three layouts. The layouts have a lot of elements, but it's mostly text and two small logo files. If I delete every single map and layout from that aprx and re-save it, it's 1447kb. What could possibly still be left in that aprx that would be that big? ("That big" being relative to arpx files - 1.4 mb is such a small amount of data to complain about!) I have the cache set to clear every time I close the program, there were only five items in the geoprocessing history, and removing those didn't help.

I tried copying the maps over to a new aprx. All of those resulted in a small/normal file size bump. I then created three blank layouts in the new aprx and copied all of the layout elements into each of the new layouts. The resulting file from that action, which seems like it ought to be identical to the original, is 220 kb. If I copy the layouts instead of the layout elements, the file jumps to 1600+kb and doesn't go down once the copied layouts are deleted.

It just seems like something needs to be ... defragmented. Compacted. Something. There is something in this file that I can't see or find, I don't know where it came from, I can't get rid of it, and it is blowing up the file size and causing performance issues that we don't have in other project files.

MXD Doctor was my go-to when weird things started happening in my mxds, and I wish I had something equivalent I could use to fix weird issues like this in Pro too.

The computer running the file where this issue started is on 3.2.2. When I copied it to my computer on 3.3.1, opened it and did nothing besides save it, it jumped from 1606 kb to 1608 kb. 

[KnoxvilleRegional]

I've got a Pro project that is now crashing immediately after it opens. This prevents me from copying and all of the maps and layers to a new project. Thankfully, this isn't a critical project that I've spent a large amount of time developing. But I can think of a dozen projects where a loss like this would cost days, maybe weeks of work. Some sort of MXD Doctor for Pro would be highly valuable!