Issue:
When opening a Collaboration Project in Plant 3D there are projects that have been deleted from the BIM360 Team Hub still being shown in the Open Project window.
Deleting a Plant 3D project (folder delete) will allow you to upload the same project again with the same name to the same BIM360 Team project. This causes both projects to be visible int he open project window.
Cause:
Deleting Plant 3D projects folder from BIM360 Team is not a supported workflow.
When you delete the Project Folder from the BIM360 Team hub this process is not a managed by Plant 3D, and as a result it is only the files that are removed form the BIM 360 Team hub and Plant 3D is unaware of this change.
This could be thought to be similar to deleting the folders for an SQL server Project, where the files will be deleted but the SQL database will still remain until removed by the Server administrator.
To complicate this testing shows that the files are (at least) temporarily still available but are not visible or accessible in BIM 360 Teams. This means that in Plant 3D 2018, a deleted project can in fact be reopened, and edited.
Solution:
The recommended process is to have only one Plant 3D project inside each BIM360 Team Project. In this way if a project needs to be deleted the BIM360 Team Project can simply be archived, which removes access for all users, and is no longer available in the Plant 3D "Open Collaboration Project" window. It can also be restored and all previous user access is also restored.
If you keep multiple Plant 3D projects inside a BIM360 Team Project you will only be able to archive the Team project when all of the Plant 3D projects are ready to be archived.
Note: There are other ways to manage this, including creating a local back-up of active projects, archiving the BIM360 Team project. Creating a new BIM360 Team project and sharing the Plant 3D Project back-ups in the new BIM360 Team project (as an example).
UPDATE:
This issue has been resolved in Plant 3D 2019.
In Plant 3D 2019 if the files in BIM 360 Teams are moved or deleted they will no longer be available in the open collaboration project window.
However if there is a copy of the project in the local user cache the project can still be opened using the recent projects list (or opening with normal 'open project'). The project will open as normal and the user will be able to edit the files, but nothing will be recorded visibly in BIM 360 Teams.
The best practice to resolve this being an issue is to ensure that all users clear their local cache folder of the 'deleted' project files. In this way a user using the recent projects list will get an error as the Project XML can't be found, and the deleted project will not be visible in the open collaboration project window preventing any confusion.
It is still my personal recommendation to have one only plant 3D project in each BIM 360 Teams project so that they can be archived independently of other projects. But if you are running Plant 3D 2019, you should be able to publish a project of the same name as a deleted project to the same Teams project without the problem of seeing removed projects.
