Windows-friendly file downloads....
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Windows has a somewhat arbitrary (and aggravatingly pointless--NTFS can support filenames of thousands of characters!) limit on path and file name length that causes all sorts of issues with files downloaded from AppColl's Files module. This is particularly problematic due to the way that AppColl names email files, which are automatically assigned a name starting with a 23-character timestamp, followed by the email address of the sender, followed by the entire subject line of the email.
This can easily result in emails that have filenames of 200+ characters, 25% of which are consumed by the timestamp and sender email address. This wrecks havoc with Windows' default filename length (260 characters?). For example, I tried to access a ZIP file of files downloaded from a matter today and found that the only way I could extract the ZIP file was to put it in a folder named "1" in my root directory and then rename the ZIP file to 2.zip before extracting it. This resulted in filenames/paths that were short enough to allow all of the files to successfully extract, but it is cumbersome--for example, one would then need to go through and rename all of the too-long files to shorten them if they are to be copied to some more useful location.
It would be great if AppColl gave users the option to specify a max path/filename length for files to have when downloading documents/files from AppColl. For example, provide a pop-up when a user clicks the Download ZIP File button that allows a user to specify a character limit (it can be set to only allow numbers within a certain range to be specified). If a number is entered, then all files being added to the ZIP file would have their path+filenames+zipfile name truncated to be no longer than the specified length as they are added to the ZIP file (the filenames in AppColl would stay the same). If no number is specified, then no truncation would occur. Truncated names that would result in duplicate names could have [XXX] added to the end, with zero-padded sequential numbers replacing the XXX.
This would allow users to specify a max length that was compatible with wherever that ZIP file is going to be placed, allowing it to be successfully extracted once in the destination location.
An alternative/supplemental feature to this would be to have a text input box instead of (or in addition to) the length input control; the user could copy and paste the destination path in that text input box, and AppColl could simply count the character length of it and then automatically adjust the filename length to meet the requirements of Windows.
Cheers,
Christian -
@GreggH8509 Great, thank you--would be very helpful!
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Hi Christian,
We have recorded this as change request whereby we will clip the length to meet Windows requirements.
