[Eclass-users] Filenames and EClass

[Kevin O. <ke...@tu...>]

Hi all,

Recently, Elke shipped me a CD-ROM with an EClass that had mysteriously 
disappearing pages. Upon seeing the EClass, I realized the problem - 
the filenames it was generating for the page, in conjuction with the 
project name, were too long for Python to accept. Therefore, it would 
not create the page on disk, although it probably would let you edit it 
in EClass. (it  just wouldn't save your changes, unfortunately.) 
Chances are, this bug is responsible for most of the "disappearing" 
page problems people have been seeing.

In Python, it appears there is a character limit that applies to *path* 
names. Path names are entire paths, like:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\EClass 
Projects\<Project Name>\Text\<Page Name>.html

The problem occurs when both the project name and the page name are 
very long, making the path name exceed 200 characters. In Elke's 
project, both the course name and the page name were 60+ characters in 
length, meaning that the entire title went over 200 characters.

One solution to this problem is to document that one should avoid long 
page names, which I think we should do regardless. Not just for 
technical reasons, but because it makes the table of contents very hard 
to use, particularly because (in this case) the page names all started 
with the same phrase "Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis". 
This resulted in a number of pages showing up in the contents page as 
"Combining Quan..." and the user had to expand the contents to fill a 
majority of the screen just to see what the page names were. If that 
phrase must appear in the page titles, an acronym such as "Combining 
Q&QA" should be chosen to improve readability and make the contents 
page easier to browse and use.

However, we should also consider technical solutions, and I wanted to 
let people know how I see things working in the future. First, I will 
use short path names (DOS names) on Windows internally, such as 
"C:\Docume~1\<username>\MyDocu~1\EClass~1\MyEClas~1\Text\" when 
creating and editing files, which will reduce the characters quite a 
bit and should not affect usage in any way. In addition, I will 
restrict project filenames to 31 characters, just as EClass already 
does with published files. Now that EClass lets you specify your own 
filenames, I can do this without putting any restriction on actual page 
names. Hopefully these changes, plus the added documentation, will 
resolve these issues in the future.

Also, BJ recently brought up a related issue:

> I am not sure this is a bug or was done intentionally. The project 
> name does not necessarily have to be the same as the Course name. For 
> example, you can change the project name and the course name is 
> unaffected. Intentional? Not that big a deal, I just thought it was 
> odd.

How things are done is that the "Project Name" in the Open Project 
dialog is actually the folder name in the EClass Projects folder. They 
get out of sync when one changes the "Course Name" in EClass, because I 
do not automatically rename the folder as well. There are a few 
approaches to fixing this issue, and I was wondering what people 
thought about them:

1) Rename the folder. This has the disadvantage that EClass will need 
to reload the course to ensure proper operation, and this is the main 
reason I avoided doing this in the past.

2) Create a "course" database. This would have the benefit that when 
you click on "Browse" and load a course it can be added to the 
"database" and thus you only need to click browse once, and from then 
on you can load it through the open dialog. The downside is that 
copying and pasting a course into your EClass Projects folder will no 
longer add the course to the "Open Project" dialog any longer. You will 
need to manually Browse for it and load it.

3) Load the Course name into the open project dialog. I've avoided 
doing this because it's a lot of work for the computer. Every time you 
load your project, it needs to go through all the courses in the EClass 
Projects folder, load the course, and then find the Course Name. We 
could do this, still, but it would probably increase load times.

4) Leave things as they are. ;-)

Please let me know what you all think about these changes!

Thanks,

Kevin