Central file naming best practice

[MTristram]

Hi
Just after a bit of background - I've been told not to have a central file name contain a 'period' (.), i.e. 210000.10 CENTRAL can someone give me the reasons for this? I'm wanting to announce this to our staff and need some reasonable sounding backup for it, rather than you shouldn't.


Cheers,

M

[DaveP]

It's really more of a Windows things than a Revit thing.
Way back in the days of DOS, a file name was made of two parts, the file name and the extension. Those parts were separated by a period.
Then Microsoft started allowing people to use periods anywhere in a file name (way back in Windows 95 or XP - someone verify that for me?)
The problem arises in that some programs - yes, even ten years later - still look for that period to figure out what the extension is. Most programs that do that simply start at the beginning of the file name and quit when they find the first period. Bad programming practice, but there are still a lot of programs out there that don't work right with multiple periods. Our PDF program is one.

[dhurtubise]

Honestly... technically it should be an issue as long as it ends with.rvt but ....
- it could cause network issues
- it could prevent some script to run on the file

[MTristram]

Honestly... technically it should be an issue as long as it ends with.rvt but ....
- it could cause network issues
- it could prevent some script to run on the file

Thanks for the comments guys,

Mel

[Steve_Stafford]

As far as Revit is concerned, you just need to be careful not to use a period and a series of four (4) digits in the name. If the name mimics the format that Revit uses for backup files exactly you'll get a warning message asking if you really want to save to a backup file.

[patricks]

"09166 Master Central.rvt" is our standard format.

09166 is the project number.

Master means it's the current file. No one should ever normally work out of any file other than the Master file (be it workshared or not).

Central of course means that it is workshared.

Sometimes other people in the office may name a file like 09166_master_central.rvt or 09166-master-central.rvt but the basics are the same. We never use periods in the file name, and no numbers other than the project number.

I know some people like to have the Revit version in the file name, which is probably a good idea, but we haven't been doing that unless it's a project being worked on right around the time of a new version release in the Spring.

[aaronrumple]

"09166 Master Central.rvt" is our standard format.

Ours is even simpler. 100048.rvt - just the project number. When worksets are enabled - 100048c.rvt