Hi

We are struggline with the naming conventions of documents in SharePoint. We have set up numerous document libraries and as far as I understand we need to make certain properties of the document compulsory.

We however have users who save the document to the library with different names, some users include abbreviations and some users include the date with the name. We want to some how automate this and force users to use the same naming conventions for documents in SharePoint.

Is their a best practice for this and possibly some way to enforce a naming convention? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Tony

You can only automate a check on the names users are using for documents they upload by programming.

Ask in the development and programming forum but it's likely that you will need to write an event handler that intercepts every upload to a document library and then rejects documents that don't follow your naming requirements.

(Post to the dev/programming forum here if this is SP 2007 otherwise if it is SP 2010 to the Visual Studio etc. forum in the SP 2010 forum set)

Hi

Thanks for the reply. Okay, that makes sense. I am not looking to spend the time developing this functionality. Just would like to understand how other organizations manage this and what is the best practice for naming documents.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Tony

Sounds like content types or maybe site columns could be useful here as well.

Are you familiar with those concepts?

Hi

Yes, I am 100% familiar with those concepts. Guess that's what WSS provides for managing documents. Guess we need to certain properties of the document compulsory.

Thanks

I would do as others have suggested, but go one step further - use content types to gather mandatory fields and then use calculated fields a a workflow to modify the "Title" field of the content.

For example, a user saves a document to the library as the desired content type and fills in the needed fields. A workflow runs as new items are created and "builds" the document title via a calculated column. So you have another calculated column that ties all the mandatory fields together into a pre-defined structure. The workflow sets the title field from the value of the calculated column.

-Brian

• Marked as answer by Leoyi Sun Thursday, November 11, 2010 9:41 AM

Hi ,

I think that the best way to do is to add some metadata to the document content type, then create an event receiver and attached to your document library. When the user adds a document, the event receiver gets the document metadata and renames the document according to the naming convention that you've specified.

The naming convention can be something like that : DOCTYPE_DATE_SEQ

DOCTYPE : is the document type selected by the user

DATE : The current date

SEQ : Sequentiel number (autoincrement)

 

what is "event receiver" and is this something that can be setup in Sharepoint 2013 on-premise or SPO?

I am looking to do the exact same thing as Tony.

Hi TryandfindIT,

  Did you get a code to solve this problem? Could you share with us?

Thanks a lot

• Edited by Saveri 11 hours 37 minutes ago

I have not yet.... I would be glad to share once I figure this out. I have been side tracked recently on some other pressing projects (aaaahhhhh the life of I.T.) anyway, I will be back working on this in the next week or two at the most. Hopefully it won't take that long.