In the recent "Friday Special" thread, there was some discussion about object naming and the need for good naming conventions.
The naming convention I've developed for my own use over the years starts with a structured portion (identifying the schema, triggering criteria, execution order, etc), but allows for a brief description of the objects purpose at the end. This is very convenient, because the fact is that the name is by far the best way to "document" the workflow in an easily accessible and meaningful way (Help Text requires you to open the object making it not very convenient). As someone who exclusively does custom workflow (and a lot of custom workflow), I very frequently bump up against the 80 character limit on the names of objects (specifically AL's, filters, and guides). And just as frequently, I use one of a few tricks to disregard the limit and set the name to be whatever it is I'd like it to be. The fact is, the underlying data dictionary columns for these names support values up to 254 characters in length (at least on Oracle & SQL Server). Also, the ARS server itself doesn't care if these name lengths exceed the 80 character limit (in that it won't throw an error if the name exceeds 80, but as I've never tried to exceed the 254 column limit so I don't know what it would do). And the workflow works just fine...I've been doing this for years. In fact, the *only *thing imposing that limit is the Dev Studio (and the Admin tool before it). With either, though, selecting multiple objects then using the Edit->Rename mechanism is one way to expand the name beyond the limit. But this is an inconvenient and awkward way of doing it. So why the limit? Can anyone hazard a guess? Or...Doug? Does anyone else find this inconvenient? -charlie _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
