Naming System

[Tanner]

I have been using Filemaker for a couple of years now. Mostly learning things as I needed to. I realized the other day that I have not really used any type of naming system for filenames, table names or field names. My question is; is it appropriate to have field names or table names with spaces? Do I have to use an underscore instead of a space? Can I use a period in a field name? What type of naming systems do other people here use? Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

P.S. I am currently using filemaker 7 in a MacOS 10.3 and Windows 2000 environment. Everything is currently working great but I didn't know if there were any adverse affects based on naming.

[Tina Marie]

Hi Tanner

The way that I have been always doing it is this way:

filenames: i use a space if it is needed most of the time it's only one word so it doesn't matter, but i have used spaces, i have had no problems with this as of yet, i use both mac and pc

table names: ditto on the above.

Period in a field name: i would'nt try to do this, i would think that it may confuse it some how, i just wouldn't try it.

my field name structure: no spaces ever, i used to use the underscore to get the visual seperation, but have decided to do it differently of late, e.g. myFieldName, basically first word is lower case, then all the other words are first letter uppercase. if i'm making a calculation field, e.g. c_myFieldName. if i'm making a global field, e.g. g_myFieldName. you probably get the idea where i'm going with this, it is just to quickly identify things, and then i sort by name and everything is great.

hope i have given you at least something to go by, nothing is set in stone with the way that you decide to name things, it's mostly personal preference.

Enjoy FM7, I love it!

[Lee Smith]

Hi Tanner,

This topic comes up from time to time, here is a recent thread that has some good information about name convictions, with a couple of links to sites with PDFs available for download that are dead on target, Click here.

HTH

Lee

[Vaughan]

Filenames with spaces cause heaps of problems when the file is shared over the web -- at least with FMP6.

[Kurt Knippel]

Mostly the problems that you will encounter deal with the web, which makes funny substitutions of characters. So that is really the only reason to concearn yourself.

[Tanner]

Thanks for all of your suggestions. I haven't ran into any problems yet but I figured before I got too deep into it I should find out how filenames affect things. Thanks!!