File naming guidelines and best practices for Documents

General Recommendations

• Keep file names at a reasonable length. While your computer may support a character limit of up to 255 for a file name, be mindful of the maximum path length limitation (e.g. 260 characters on Windows). We suggest keeping the file name length to no more than 30 characters.
• Avoid using spaces. Use a hyphen instead.
• Don’t start or end a file name with a space, period, hyphen, or underline; instead, start with a letter or number.
• Some operating systems are case-sensitive; ideally, keep it consistent. 
• For consistency,  make sure the filename indexes logically with every version you upload.
   

Examples of poor file naming convention: 

• ‘F&A Costs.html’ – the web browser will read this as ‘F&A%20Costs.html’ 
• ‘my PDF file#name.pdf‘– the web browser will read this as ‘my%20PDF%20file%23name.pdf’

Note: Web browsers replace spaces with a %20 character which can be problematic when searching or linking to a file in the future.
 

Examples of good file naming convention:

• ‘my-pdf-file-name.pdf’
• ‘mep-electric-drawing-spec-314.pdf’
• 'MAJ-DWG-001_A.PDF'

Characters to avoid in filenames

Many special characters are reserved/used by Aconex as search parameters, so it's best to avoid using these in your filenames to ensure your searches behave as expected. For example:

Invalid characters in Document and Project Fields