Presence of apostrohe in the file name stucks the workflow

Hi All,

The presence of an apostrophe in the file or folder name is hanging our workflows at the custom instantiation screen loading whenever that file is being submitted. The screen is loading properly when the file/ folder is renamed to remove the apostrophe. Anyone have an idea about this? Please let me know if I could help you with additional information; I am confused what info should be given here additionally.

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nipper

You need to provide more details. Is this a WFT or WFM ? Does this happen for all workflows or your custom one ? If so, what step is it hanging on.

Most likely it hangs on some custom Perl (or java) that cannot handle the apostrophe.

That being said, I would fix it so that no files have special characters instead of trying to fix this.

Adam Stoller

I would tend to agree with nipper - you're generally going to find things much easier is the only characters you allow in file names are alphanumeric plus (regular) dash, underscore, and periods - anything else should be flagged to the user to be corrected to conform to the standard.

For templated content, you can usually use a little bit of FormAPI code to ensure that proposed filenames meet these requirements and even, if desired, force them to do so by stripping out all the bad characters (I usually convert spaces to underscores and then completely remove all other bad characters)

For non-templated content, especially files that are imported by users - you can create your own import script that verifies file names before actually performing the import (potentially doing something similar to the templated force-correction process) or you need to put a step early in the workflow process (possibly in the WFT or custom instantiation configuration file [WFM] code) to detect such problems and prevent any further processing.

Some users like to argue that they should be able to name the files and folders any way they want to - I suggest you inform them that such characters do not conform to web standards and thus are not fully supported by the web content management system, and that they should just consider using other, accepted, characters if they feel that the filenames aren't descriptive enough (e.g.: dashes and underscores)

sanu

Thanks for your replies. To provide additional info:

This issue happens with my custom workflow only. It is developed in WFM. I have configured the custom_instantiation.cfg file for the custom instantiation screen to provide some additional fields for the user to fill in. I have added a few JavaScript logic for validation as well. The workflow is getting stuck in the custom instantiation screen itself. the screen is keep on loading. There is no external call server calls within the custom instantiation screen. I confirmed that the custom JS code is not creating the problem.

There are no errors getting logged for this as well :-(

Yeah even I feel the solution suggested by you people will be better in this scenario; correcting the file/folder names to avoid the usage of special characters.

RonaldV

Sanal,

it might be an idea to set your workflow into debug mode and then have a view at the wft-xml that is generated. Chances are that this xml is corrupted because of your apostrophe (which might not be xml-escaped)

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