Generated file names too long!

Apr 05, 2018

Steven Strell
By Steven Strell

This has been an issue for years and I'm not sure why it should be.  Some of the files generated by Presenter have names that are too long for Windows if the name of the training in the Player settings (or the folder name; not sure what exactly is causing the issue) is long.  The publish completes successfully, but if I move the published output, I get errors in the middle of copying like the ones attached.  If Presenter can't shorten the file names it creates (not sure why they are so long and complicated) at least it would be helpful if there was some type of indication that something (the title or whatever is causing the issue) was too long so it could be shortened.

4 Replies
Katie Riggio
6 years ago04/06/18 at 9:16 pm (UTC)

Hi, Steven! I'd be happy to dig deeper into this for you! I've got a few questions to start:

  • Are you able to share what the original file name for one of your projects was?
  • Can you also let us know your process with moving the file?
  • Are you publishing your course for Web, LMS, or something else?

I want to make sure I understand your experience correctly and will be standing by!

Steven Strell
6 years ago04/06/18 at 9:29 pm (UTC)

So the actual title of the training as set in the Player settings is not very long: Creating a System Design with Platform Designer.  But I'm just copying the files to a server (for safe keeping) that has a long path to the material: \\<server_name>\ABG$\CCI-TS\TSA\TST\RS\AppsWorkDir\Training\Courses\In-Work\Online\CN\PD_Sys_Creation_CN\Qsys_Sys_Creation_CN

I'm publishing for the web.

Katie Riggio
6 years ago04/09/18 at 10:05 pm (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your experience with me, Steven. You raise a great point, and I hope I can shed some light on this!

While this is outside of my expertise, I'm really curious to know more as well. From my understanding, it's recommended to use short names to ensure the file paths to your projects and published output are well under the 260 character limit imposed by Microsoft Windows. Long path names are really difficult for most applications to handle, and while open, Presenter projects themselves are made up of many nested levels of organized content.

Are you able to publish to a location with a very short path (such as your desktop) or rename the folder name to a shorter one to see if that helps?

I've relayed all of this information over to our support engineers in a case, so we can dive deeper into this for you. You should receive a confirmation email shortly, and I'll be following the case as well!

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