I’ve just recently written a script which imported a load of content from flat files into Tridion. Using the flat files, the script creates the various folders, pages and components etc that it needed. Unfortunately I cannot share the code as the client contract permits me to do (plus it was a throw-away tool written specifically around the format of the import data) but I can share a couple of titbits that I learnt about item naming and WebDAV lengths.
Note: All of the below are tests performed in Tridion 2009.
Item naming.
The following rules are present:
The CMS GUI will not let you enter more than 250 characters when naming (the item Title field) Publications, Folders, Components and Structure groups. This also applied to the Structure Group “directory†field.
I found the page ‘Title’ field has a little quirk when naming as the GUI will allow an infinite number of characters however, if you enter more than 255, you will receive an error message like the one below:
The page ‘Filename’ follows the normal convention of only allowing a user to enter 250 characters.
Tridion will allow most special characters, with the exception of “/†but I wouldn’t recommend ever using special characters as this will only lead to problems later in life J
If you simply must have special chars in your naming this post may help you should you ever need to obtain such items using WebDav.
WebDAV paths.
The maximum length of a WedDAV path (on the system tested) is 300 characters. Which means it is very easy to exceed this limit with a combination of long folder names and a deep folder structure.
The best advice is to keep all naming as short as possible and again avoid special characters.
Final note, I’ve only experimented with the items mentioned above, but I’m sure the same rules apply to items such as Page & Component templates etc.
Related to filename length restrictions, I’ve discovered that when publishing a binary using the AddBinary method, the variant ID cannot be more that 40 chars in length. It causes a publishing error without a good stacktrace.
Be careful when constructing the variant ID by concatenating the Tcm ID or the page ID with the page filename for example. It may work in one environment (e.g. Development) and then fail in another since IDs change between environments.
fail in another if the Tcm IDs differ in the length of digits from one env to the next.
I’ve had a developer report a 255 character limit on keywords with Tridion 5.3. He was probably not using keywords in the way they were intended, though.
As an update I see we still have the character limit on Keywords in SDL Tridion 2013 SP1 (I’ve a client that uses them to populate drop-downs – via published category XML structures – again, not really the ‘designed’ purpose).