File name length limit STILL 31 characters!!!

Long requested... Remove the limit of 31 characters in creo file name If you have maintenance, you can vote on the product enhancement request.

This has been in the planning for a long time with no implementation in sight.

Duplicate request/complaint!

How many PTC programmers does it take to fix the length of the name field?

32, but only 31 work.

I appreciate the replies... I know this is a duplicate complaint.  I just needed to rant about it since, at the moment, it's interfering with my job, once again.

😎

<rant>

With 26 alphabetic characters, 10 digits, and the underscore you have only 37^31 possible names or 4113897303606771042156868599311296618503721408813.

Did you run out?

It's an easy limit to hit when making filenames into encyclopedia entries covering revision history and routing and material and who worked on it and what the release level is and so many other non-name factors.

The good news is they are apparently going to increase the limit, but I shudder to think of looking into a model tree with part names of 512 characters, or maybe 1024 just to be sure.

</rant>

I wholeheartedly concur...

This functional change could hardly be called an enhancement or improvement... it's an essential necessity. This "CREO IDEA" is over 5 years old.  While some creo uses don't find the file name length a hindrance, many of us have a need to identify parts, assemblies, and drawings with sensible and practical names.  While this is a testament to the variety of uses of creo, the length of file names should not be a limitation to those of us who would benefit by this capability.  15 years ago, 31 characters was enough to discern between parts and assemblies developed for a few clients.  Now, with thousands of clients, and hundreds of thousands of distinct parts that would more easily be understood with meaningful file names, this has become a limitation of productivity and profitability, especially while trying to compete with other growing contemporary CAD providers.

It is obvious, from the Replies, that CREO is used in a vast variety of implementations.  Not everybody needs the capability to use long, or even descriptive filenames for CREO files... but a great many do.  And just because a computer file name could be 255 characters long (there are other limitations - because of file path), doesn't mean that the use of the longest file name possible is practical, or sensible.  Anybody who wants to could still use the default short incremental file names... just please give me the contemporary tool of sufficiently long file names (maybe 50 or 55 characters would suffice for the next 10 years or so - and still leave 200 characters for the path), so that I can be descriptive when I have the need.  There are occasions when sufficiently descriptive file names simply makes it easier to be productive, and competitive.  If it wasn't for descriptive names, msn.com would still have to be identified by 13.82.28.61 (yes - there are already website names that exceed 31 characters and are reasonably descriptive - look it up).  And I still name files in my documents directory something meaningful to me, even though I don't have 10,000 files in there.

At minimum for Legacy purposes, and for things like emails stored in WC, the length should not be limited (WC should just match Windows and other supported OSs), because when you are importing something it increases the likeliness of a poorly thought out migration where users are forced to truncate the file names and essentially lose information that was stored in the file name for many years prior to migrating to WC.

@bsingleton and all others reading, do yourselves and your customers a favor and do the following:

• Migrate the long filename as another field (name, description, or better yet create a non-required field/attribute such as Legacy_filename)
• Get your company to decide on a standard naming scheme for the filename/number meaningful and not random (smart sequential is better), and then use that going forward. 
• Get your company to use your company created attributes, or create some, to capture essential information that you would want to search by later (e.g. product name, category, etc).
• Update your standard.

This way you might actually be able to narrow your search when trying to find the right document later.  This is advise that I wish we received and followed during a past migration because it would have put us in a much better place now...rather than doing a search and getting a hundred files that no longer have a descriptive name and you have to open them all to find the right one...every time you do a search!

Little pain upfront, but a lot less pain and much more benefit later on (read: increased productivity & reduced user frustration).

Hopefully for you this will not be great advise too late (like Mom yelling "careful" after she hears you get hurt...or the kaboom! )

2023 and still counting.

Finally we have at least a target for the fix of this problem, Creo 12!

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Creo-Parametric-Ideas/Remove-the-limit-of-31-characters-in-creo-file-name/idc-p/914840/highlight/true#M20042

So possibly around 15 years from product idea to implementation for a thing that has not been a problem in any other program for decades, that's nice.