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November 24, 2008
Question

File name limit/character case

  • November 24, 2008
  • 6 replies
  • 2360 views
Good morning to all! Is there truly a 25 character FILE name limit for RH? I've been advised by Adobe that there is...but this is truly news to me after 10 years of working with RH. Its very painful to fit names into that limit when you have over 1000 topics in a project! But I renamed everything...carefully using MixedCharacterCase to try to establish order. Saving often! But then when I had to reimport files after rebuilding the .cpd file the MixedCharacterCase had turned to mixedcharactercase for many files. Ugh! Truly unreadable!

So...is 25 characters truly a requirement? And...how to you force RH to remember the MixedCharacterCase for the File name? Help!...and THANK YOU!!!!
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6 replies

November 24, 2008
ok...thanks! I did think you were 'less than happy'. I'm chartering a jet for chocolates if you can resolve this!!!
November 24, 2008
Hi Peter. Yes you did. But since I called Adobe and asked for help and they SWORE that the 25 character limit was in fact law...I decided I needed to try it to make sure it was not the solution I was seeking. If I say No to their suggestions...I'm concerned that they will tell me that they can't help me...and I absolutely, positively need help with this project. 4-8 minutes to save a single image name, 5+ minutes to import a simply HTML file...ugh...life is miserable. So...I gave this a try.

But when I rebuilt the .cpd file using the .hhk file and it lost 90% of the project even with those cute unreadable short file names I knew I was in trouble. So I decided to ask this group formally if 25 was really the limit, get the concensus and then respectfully ask Adobe to rethink this 'solution'. I'm in the 24 response time window with them now. This is just no longer much fun for this project and its business critical. You know it well...

I was not doubting your first answer...I was grasping at straws and now I need to be able to quote this group that they have an error in their Technical documentation.

What Fun - not!!!
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 24, 2008
Sounds like you thought I was grumpy. I was teasing.

I hope I can take a look at your project soon.

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November 24, 2008
Rick...that's NOT me! But funny! Thanks for sharing. Amazingly...we bought an in-dash GPS this weekend for my birthday. For my husband's same-age birthday I bought him a BMW Z-3 convertible. For my birthday I got a GPS and backup camera. Something is not right about this equation...!

Now I I could just resolve this !%!%!#$%!^!$ sluggish RH project the world would be sweet!!! :-)
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 24, 2008
Did I not tell you when you offlined me that the only limit I knew was the path and filename limit?

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November 24, 2008
This makes me laugh out loud!!! It I weren't crying from the 20+ hours I've spend renaming files!!! oh my...good idea. I will suggest that they revisit that...!!!!
Captiv8r
Legend
November 24, 2008
LMarden is spot on with the observation on Call centers and reading scripts. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that were the case.

Sorry for the grief Teri!

Here's something that will make you laugh. I was searching the web for GPS reviews and came across this one.
Click here

Cheers... Rick
November 24, 2008
Column, thanks for the quick response! I understand how to change the file name back...but once I do that - what's to keep it from doing this again? Yes...RH7 has this problem! I don't mind doing it once more...but not over and over. ??

I'm going to politely push back on the file name limit. I've never heard of this either and my other projects are great and they all have many more than 25 characters in the names. There has to be something else at play here. thanks!
November 24, 2008
just had a thought - many larger call centers for software support provide relatively little troubleshooting training for their support reps, but build a really extensive knowledge base for them to use - basically, most cases are resolved by reading a KB topic to the client asking for assistance.

so wouldn't it be a hoot if there was a typo on their internal KB article, and instead of 25 characters, they should be telling us 256? 256k is a common field size limitation, from as far back as the days of DOS...
RoboColum_n_
Legend
November 24, 2008
Well I've certainly not heard of such a limit Teri. A 255 character path limit maybe but not 25 characters per file as I've been breaking this rule for years without a problem.

As far as the mixed character case issue is concerned, RH has problems with this. I think it still exists in RH7 although I don't have it. The answer is for a file called "filea.htm" that you want to "FileA.htm" to rename it to "fileab.htm" and then to "FileA.htm". The additional character in the file name makes all the difference.