If you are working with files in the Quickr connector you might sometimes not be able to open a file in a Quickr place. This could be because the maximum allowed path length of the locally stored copy of the file has ben exceeded.quickr
The Quickr connector is using a cache area on the local file system to store temporary copies of the file being worked on. By default, this directory is found in Window XP at
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Libraries\quickr85\<placename>\
or with a German Windows XP
C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\<username>\Libraries\quickr85\<placename>\
Below of that directory Quick creates different subdirectories for Folder and Rooms. In the worst case (document is located in a room and in a sub folder in that room; it does not matter how deep the level of nested rooms and folders is) the path length will be:
47 Characters (German: 52)
+ Windows Username
+ Place Title (without special characters)
+ Place-ID (like: @P<placeURL>)
+ 33 character Room ID (like: @RPageLibraryC125788F002A2846.nsf)
+ 14 character Folder ID of a subfolder (like: @Fm0NLJXiPKlSR)
+ 34 character Document ID (like: @D32FB5E1F4D38DA9AC125788F002A5A78)
That means the path length is at least 130 (47+2+33+14+34) (German: 135) characters plus number of characters of user name and 2x the number of characters of the place URL.
Example:
Username: Administrator (13 characters)
Place Title: acmeteamplacetest (17 Zeichen)
For the cache directory 177 (130 + 13 + 17 + 17) (German: 182) characters are needed.
Windows has a maximum allowed path length of 260 characters (one character is an end marker so effective only 259 characters)..
For the file name of a file, which should be opened by the Quickr connector, only 259 – 177 = 82 (German: 77) characters remain.
If you want to work with files in MS Office the maximum allowed path length is shorter than Windows allows. It is for
MS Word: 242 characters (including one end marker; effective: 241))
MS Excel: 218 Zeichen (including one end marker; effective: 217))
In the example above the maximum allowed length of the file name would be in
MS Word: 241 – 177 = 64 (German: 59) characters
MS Excel: 217 – 177 = 40 (German: 35) characters
As you can see, the maximum length of a filename which can be opened by the Quickr connector is depending on several things factors and you cannot exactly say where the upper limit will be.
In general you should try to keep the file name as short as possible. Using a shorter place title will also increase the maximum allowed file name length.
Yes, we too have seen this issue. Only with Excel so far, but that may be because there are many more Excel files for us stored than other file types. Seems to me I read somewhere that Excel has a limit of 254 characters, but that could be for a different version?? (2003, 2007, 2010). Regardless, there are limits and it seems to me that it is far too easy to reach those limits than it should be.
For certain users, we have also changed the default storage location from their Windows profile location to something right off the root (i.e. C:\qkr). That does give us more opportunity before we hit the limits. But of course that becomes a difficulty for managing on a place-by-place basis, too.
thanks for pointing this out, and I would be interested in hearing how others may be dealing with this issue.
This is a more significant issue when you consider DBCS (double byte character sets), where the effective limit on the filename is even shorter. Our import and export utilities for Quickr manage these limits with some very creative (and important) algorithms to guarantee uniqueness and still preserve value in the human readable name.