Question

File Naming Convention

Asked by: RobKearney

Hi,

We are looking for a unique way to datetime stamp our pdf's we are saving.

e.g. Report22/10/09_11:12:13.pdf

Does anyone know of a clever way of doing this to abbreviated the name?? are there any functions about, or do you have anything developed for this issue

We use VS 2005 VB.NET

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Asked On
2009-10-22 at 08:44:30ID24834984
Topics

.NET

,

Visual Studio

,

Microsoft Visual Basic.Net

Participating Experts
4
Points
250
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: Omego2KPosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:12:20ID: 25635858

There are no functions(at least none that I know of) that are specific to naming files with a date, but there are many others you can use to accomplish this.

Dim myFileName As String = DateTime.Now.ToString("Reportdd_MM_yy_hh_mm_ss.pdf")

The above would result in the following format:
Report22_10_09_11_12_13.pdf

file names can't have "/" or ":"

 

by: omegaomegaPosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:22:09ID: 25635967

Hello, RobKearney,

I don't exactly understand what it is you are asking.  But on FAT and NTFS and most other file systems I know you won't be able to include "/" or ":" characters in the file name.

But please, please, please use some variant of the ISO international date standard.  It is far superior to both the American and European date conventions for a great many reasons.  A couple of the most important:

     - The normal alphabetic sort order for file names will also provide you with sorting by date.
     - It can't be confused with either the American or European conventions (either of which can easily be confused with the other).
     - Your code won't cause any Y3K problems.  ;-)

Cheers,
Randy

 

by: KBannerPosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:33:21ID: 25636091

Hi Guys,

We are running these pdfs to email later, and have a batch file that churns the pdfs out one after the other. We now realise that we need each file unique, which means we need to include milliseconds too.

For that reason, the file name will become non-readable, and so we are going to introudce a simple indexing method (ie. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7...... for the different pdfs)

Thanks to you both for your posts. I'll split the points

 

by: RobKearneyPosted on 2009-10-22 at 09:36:42ID: 25636125

Hi Guys,

We are running these pdfs to email later, and have a batch file that churns the pdfs out one after the other. We now realise that we need each file unique, which means we need to include milliseconds too.

For that reason, the file name will become non-readable, and so we are going to introudce a simple indexing method (ie. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7...... for the different pdfs)

Thanks to you both for your posts. I'll split the points

 

by: VBRocksPosted on 2009-10-22 at 11:09:30ID: 25637251

I totally recommend formatting the date as "yyyyMMdd" (20091022), and the time as "hhmmss" (010101)

So that would be:

Dim dt As DateTime = Now

'Use this format:  "yyyyMMdd hhmmss"
Dim fileName as string = String.Format("Report {0}.pdf", dt.ToString("yyyyMMdd hhmmss")

So the file name would be:  "Report 20091022 120530.pdf"

The reason this convention is preferable is that the file name sorts correctly in windows.

 

by: RobKearneyPosted on 2009-10-23 at 04:43:36ID: 25643390

Oh sorry guys, never split points.

Thanks to VBRocks for last comment. See the point of Sorting in Windows

 

by: RobKearneyPosted on 2009-10-23 at 04:44:45ID: 31644600

Thanks to all for your posts

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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