Is that a BUG? Exporting an item with long name...

[arisaka]

I'm using a registed UR over one month, everything is fine, and UR is a good PDF files keeper. But when I export an item, the exported file (or directory) always has filename which doesn't exceed in 50 characters. For example, the item title "Estimation of number of people in crowded scenes using perspective transformation.pdf" is exported as filename "Estimation of number of people in crowded scenes u.pdf". Any idea?

[kevina]

This is "by design", provided as a way to help keep exported paths less than 260 characters (which is the effective limit for Windows).

Windows technically supports creating paths up to 32K in length, but most Windows applications (including Windows Explorer!!) do not. This makes 260 characters the maximum path length for all practical purposes.

You can verify this by attempting to create a file with a path longer than 260 characters with Windows Explorer...

All of this highlights another advantage to keeping your files in an Ultra Recall Info Database (this limitation on names, and "paths" is eliminated). Of course, as you point out, exported Info Item name's are truncated (as explained above) to workaround Windows limitations.

[arisaka]

Thanks for your explanation. If UR just limits an item name to 260 characters, that's another problem, how to ensure that the exported path will be less than 260 characters? Does UR always truncate exported filename to fit the max length of path?

[kevina]

I was a bit unclear in my explanation. Ultra Recall will never use more than 50 characters of an Info Item's title for the exported filename. This arbitrary number was chosen as a compromise between having meaningful file names, and assisting the user in reducing the situations where the Windows path length limit is exceeded.

An error will occur and the export process will stop if exporting an Info Item would create a path longer than 260 characters. This is less than ideal because it means that it is not possible to export an entire Info Database to your hard-drive with deep structure and long filenames. Unfortunately the underlying issue is a significant limitation of Windows, which we have no control over.

The next version of Ultra Recall will support XML export (which optionally exports the stored files as well). This XML export will record the relationships (hierarchy) between Info Items in an xml (oml format) file. If the stored documents are exported, they are exported to single folder and referenced in the xml, eliminating this issue.