Some notes about Tridion item naming

John Winter — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:02:15 +0000

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.

Tridion Developer » Migration

Some notes about Tridion item naming