[Building Sakai] Resource file names

[Matthew Jones]

The Sakai CHS was created years ago, and my best guess would be because
some filesystems on OSes that are actively used (Windows specifically)
highly restrict the characters you can have in file/directory names over
others. Which means we'd have to have had taken the absolute smallest
possible character set and only allowed that for file/course and other
names in Sakai, even if the host OS allowed for more characters. It was
seems easier just to do a translation and not be restrictive in the app
then or in the future.

For instance on FAT and NTFS are are all illegal characters. / ? < > \ : *
| ” ^

There are also like 50 special reserved file names that are not allowed.
OSX and UNIX depending on the file system also have restrictions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename#Reserved_characters_and_words

In addition, (I believe) the initial design of Sakai wasto store all files
as binary content in the database (which this still supports). Only later
was an option made to convert these out to the file system. Once the entire
set of characters was allowed in the initial version of Sakai, it only made
sense to allow export to something that was encoded so there was never any
problems in directory names or file names. It's not possible to convert out
from an unlimited character system to a limited one.


On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Jaques Smith <jaques at opencollab.co.za>
wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Can anyone tell my why files are not stored under their normal names.
> Example if you save a file (*MyFile.pdf*) in Resource on the *Mercury *site
> in the *Test *folder, why is or can it not be stored under
> <storageRoot>/mercury/Test/MyFile.pdf?
>
> Thanks,
> Jaques
>
>
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