Projects

A Phoenix project is the workspace in which workflows, operational objects, and worksheets are combined to perform an analysis. Phoenix projects contain the following items:

Data folder for worksheets and other datasets

Code folder for PML, ASCII, and NONMEM code

Tables folder for HTML formatted tables

BQL Rules folder for BQL rules

Documents folder for binary objects not placed in the other folders

Shortcuts for pointers to input data files that were imported as shortcuts

Workflow object that is used to group operational objects

Two of the benefits of Phoenix projects is that they allow analysis work to be easily organized and saved. You can save projects as Phoenix project files (*.phxproj) locally or save them to a database, such as Integral.

Phoenix projects are designed to be easily updated and shared, which allows for better data management. A project file contains all the datasets, such as study data, that were imported into a project so project files can be exchanged with other Phoenix users without also having to exchange external data sources. Sharing Phoenix projects has two main advantages:

Multiple Phoenix users can review the steps and processes used in an analysis.

The amount of time needed to validate the results of an analysis is decreased.

Phoenix project files might be rejected by some email servers since they are password protected, in which case permissions will need to be adjusted to allow the .phxproj files.

Phoenix does not automatically save projects. You must choose to save the project. Phoenix also prompts for saving projects when the application is closed. By default, Phoenix project files are saved in your Documents folder in \Certara\Phoenix Projects.

Note: Certain operations in Phoenix may occasionally generate “out of memory” errors. Merging in large datasets, generating plots with many pages or lattices, running covariate shotgun on an NLME model, and saving multiple projects on the close of Phoenix are some examples of cases where a computer may not have enough free memory to complete the operation. Many times, the error only results in the offending object not displaying properly, while the remainder of output is unaffected.

To reduce the occurrence of memory errors while working with Phoenix: ensure that only the active Phoenix project is open; close any other applications that are open on the computer (email, web browsers, etc.); work with only relevant subsets of large datasets so as not to carry around unused data in the workflow; create multiple plot or table objects to subset a large dataset. Of course, it is always a good working practice to save projects at regular intervals.