Poll: DC Naming conventions: Acceptable length of DC name

[Former Member]

Hi All,

My team is on a NW04S NWDI SP10 setup for WebDynpros.Recently we've been having many issues with DTR/CBS/CMS like, local remote name clashes, transport failing to Acceptance system, sometimes Webdynpro iViews dont show up in Acceptance system after a transport etc.

The NWDI Admin team is investigating the issues and found that the length of the DC name could be one of the reasons for these problems. And I'm doing my bit to help them reach a conclusion with regards to this specific reason.

The average length of DC names in our SCs is 12 (ranging from 8 - 16). Even though SAP recommends the DC names should not be more than 8 characters long and the same is not enforced in the Studio.

Please treat this as a Poll as to how long your DC names have been on an average, and if you've come up with such or different issues which you could pin point to this reason.

Any suggestions/SAP Notes etc are also helpful.

If this reason is serious enough for the whole NWDI community, I'll make an article or a wiki out of it and may be SAP could force restrictions on the names.

I appreciate your help with points (for every post).

Many Thanks,

Rajit

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Rajit. We migrated our java apps from WebSphere to Netweaver over two years ago and we've been creating DCs with names longer than 8 characters with no problem at all.

I think the longest name we've used was 24 characters.

[Former Member]

The NWDI Admin team has concluded that this is not the real reason for the issue. They are still investigating. Thanks for all your help.

[Former Member]

Since I can't find a note regarding this right now, here's some technical info I have:

The vendor name can be up to 20 characters

The DC name can be up to 40 characters (newer SPs seem to support 80 internally).

A DC name can consist of multiple segments (separated by '/') and the NWDS warns if a segment is longer than 8 characters. You don't have to use segments, but it can be used similar to packages in Java to group common stuff as segments will map to folders in DTR and in the local filesystem. I have seen no problems so far with DCs that had longer segments and indeed quite a lot of DCs provided by SAP do not stick to that segment length.

The most limitating issue seems to be the Windows filesystem or the inability of Java to correctly handle files with a total path length of more than 250 odd characters (I'm not sure about Pascal's notion of 255, and it may also depend on the exact JDK version. See e.g. http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6481955 ). MAX_PATH on Unix systems is usually much longer and I haven't seen anybody reach that limit with NWDI.

Both NWDS and CBS also try to keep path lengths short by using only numbers for imported development configurations or some hex-coded IDs in the temporary build folders.

You have to keep in mind that on Windows you can easily produce very long pathnames if you have something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\UserID\Workspace.jdi\12\DCs\vendor.com\full\DC\name\with\a\lot\of\segments\_comp\src\packages\com\java\package\structure\for\wd\SomeVeryLongClassName.java

So I think the DC name is only part of the problem. The depth of your Java package structure, the length of your class names (or other files) and the location of your workspace folder are equally relevant.

Regards,

Marc

[Former Member]

Pascal and Marc,

Thank you very much for your time. Your inputs are so very valuble.

David, Thanks to you too.

Regards,

Rajit Srinivas

[Former Member]

SAP's recommendation is not to have DC segment names of more than 8 characters. You can create DC with names having more than 8 characters without a problem as long as you separate segment names with a slash '/' and keep the length of the segment names below 8 characters. The warning that NWDS gives for DC names with more than 8 characters will not show up then. These segment names will become folders on the filesystem. Here are some examples:

portal/uwl/ext

portal/uwl/ext/lib

...

This naming style makes your DC names much more self-descriptive and allow you to have related DCs in the same folders on your filesystem (you will have less folders on the toplevel).

I've been using this DC naming style without any problems (on an AIX based NWDI; Windows based systems should not have problems with these names either).

What you should know though is that some OS's (like Windows) do not handle paths of more than 255 characters properly. For this reason you should move your CBS folder to a high level on your disk/partition (like C:\CBS). Also assign high level foldernames to your NWDS workspace/Development Configuration Pool Root folder.