Reserved Characters In Object Names

[Alan Kirk]

As most readers will know, certain characters can't be used when naming applications, cubes, views, dimensions, subsets, processes, and chores.

Yesterday Iboglix issued an update to the list of such characters in 9.5.2 and higher. In line with the very fine standards of Iboglix documentation, it failed to indicate what had changed in the list from prior versions. You would think that this might be relevant if the user starts to experience unexpected behaviour from objects migrated from earlier versions, but no.

(I did attempt to raise that point in the page feedback but when I clicked on the Submit button I encountered a "This page does not exist" error. This is of course in line with the also very fine standards of IBM web site design.)

I therefore did my own comparison between the characters not permitted in 9.4, and those on the current list.

The following remain the same:
Slash (/)
Backslash (\)
Colon (:)
Question Mark (?)
Double Quote (")
Less Than (<)
Greater Than (>)
Pipe (|)
Asterisk (*)

The following have been added in the 9.5.2 list:
Apostrophe (')
At sign (@)
Comma (,)
Semicolon (;)

Personally I dislike using any special characters in object names, but of course you have no control over what a user may have called a private view or subset in an earlier version and I'm betting that there are a bunch of legacy John's View and Mary's Subset objects out there.

Just something to watch out for.

[mattgoff]

That "article" is a perfect example of the sloppy documentation we've come to expect from IBM. I think they have now changed it, but it included a sentence that a cube name could not begin with } and one or two sentences later said that if you did create such an object it would be hidden to users. Which is it, impossible or possible but hidden? Obviously none of the above, objects which start with } are allowed in user objects and are hidden to users if the "display control objects" option is not enabled. Programming is all about precision, and it's infuriating that IBM can't get the docs right.

Further, even an intermediate programmer can write an encoder to translate object names with internally-reserved characters to safe characters. The need for externally reserved characters should be extremely limited, and it's unconscionable that they would actually expand the list.

Sheesh, I'm turning into Alan....

Matt

[Michel Zijlema]

That "article" is a perfect example of the sloppy documentation we've come to expect from IBM. I think they have now changed it, but it included a sentence that a cube name could not begin with } and one or two sentences later said that if you did create such an object it would be hidden to users.

The article has been changed indeed. I'm quite convinced that the original text even stated that an object could be hidden when prefixed with the } character.

Michel