What are Empty Package assets and is there a way to see them in Content Browser

Development Asset Creation
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1

I’ve noticed that there is a special kind of asset called Empty Package that’s appearing in some odd cases.

Is there any information on what it actually is and if there’s a way to see them in the content browser? (e.g. like you can show redirectors, but couldn’t find any similar options empty packages in content browser filters).

Sometimes I was running into situations when I couldn’t remove an empty folder (though no redirectors were present in it), I wonder if it’s caused by those Empty Packages still being present and seeing them would help identifying if they are part of the problem.

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How to make it appear.
0. Show ridrectors in Content browser → Filter → Other Filters → Show Redirectors

  1. Create a level ‘NewWorld’
  2. Create a BP ‘yy’ and add it to ‘NewWorld’.
  3. Save both assets.
  4. Move ‘yy’ to folder ‘test’
  5. Fix up redirectors in the project.
  6. Move ‘yy’ back to the folder next to ‘NewWorld’. Now redirector ‘yy’ will appear in ‘test’ folder.
  7. Remove folder ‘yy’. Confirm Force Delete.
  8. Now you’re in odd situtation when ‘test’ still exists, though it appears to be empty. And there’s one asset that’s needed to be saved:
    image
    If you try to save it, you’ll see that there’s an “Empty Package” asset in place of our test/yyy redirector. Voila, we created an empty package.
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    Btw no idea what’s the proper exit out of this situtation, since Save Selected won’t have any effect. The only way to solve it I’ve found is to move ‘yy’ to ‘test/yy’ and the issue will be overcomed.
2

Maybe empty packages do not actually exist physically and it’s just Unreal way of saying something got broken, as the following code lists no assets, though presumably empty package should be in this folder.

import unreal

folder = "/Game/NewFolder1/test"

assets = unreal.EditorAssetLibrary.list_assets(folder, recursive=True, include_folder=True)

# No output.
for asset_path in assets:
    print(asset_path)

print('---')