Unable to open two databases

I have a client who can’t open two Panorama X databases, but his employee can. They are both using the latest versions of Panorama 10.2 and Monterey. The employee can open the files but if the owner transfers the files to his computer, he can’t open them. He sent me copies and I can’t open them either. The permissions are set to read and write for everyone.

Any thoughts?

Does everyone have the same database integrity preference?

Could this be where the database is locked to an account?

See Database Options/Security/Lock Database to Account

Thanks Robert. That option is actually under Database Options. We’ll give it a try.

Yes they do.

That’s not much information. Is there any kind of message?

That sounds likely, but if so, there should be a message that says you are not authorized.

If this was a database integrity issue, you would see a message that the database is damaged.


If Panorama doesn’t recognize the database at all, to me that sounds like the file does not have the proper .pandb extension. I always change my Finder preferences to show file extensions so that this kind of situation can’t sneak up on me.

The message is, “the document “DocName” can not be opened”. The database is not locked to an account, I can’t open it with integrity check turned off, permissions are set properly, and the extension is .pandb .

There are two DBs in question. One can be opened by an employee; the other can not. The owner and I can’t open either.

Panorama database files are actually packages, which is essentially a folder with a special setting that tells the Finder to treat it as a file. You can right click on a database and choose Show Package Content to see what’s inside. You should see either eight or nine components inside a database package, like this (the integrity.plist file will only appear if this database is using the database integrity option).

If any of these internal files are missing, the open would fail with a generic error. So you should check to see if your database contains these internal files.

When sending a Panorama database from one computer to another, the best bet is to compress it into a .zip file. This “smushes” all of the internal files into one file, so that they won’t get separated.

If you do find that there is a missing internal file, the only option is to find a backup that contains all of the needed components.

I’ve made a note to make sure a less generic error message is displayed in this situation (at the moment, it is simply displaying the generic Apple error message).

Yikes! There are no components. The window is blank. They do .zip their databases religiously.

Recently he said that he downloaded the database from the server. He also showed me a screenshot of a shared database. I’m getting mixed messages as to what’s going on. I don’t think this is a shared file because it doesn’t give me a connection error when trying to open it. Maybe it would if it had any components in the package.

Could they have been keeping this file in a shared folder, i.e. Dropbox, iCloud Drive, etc.? If multiple computers are accessing a file simultaneously in a shared folder things can get scrambled, though I’ve not heard of a completely empty package before.

BIngo – the information about sharing is in one of the components.

If this is a shared database hopefully they can just download a correct copy from the server.