Failure to notify if export file name has illegal characters

[Swarfmaker]

In the F360 browser it is perfectly OK to use characters that would be illegal in the windows file system.  This is easily missed when exporting to your local machine, but unfortunately nothing is done to tell you that a problem has arisen.  At the moment you can click export in the required format to a local destination and as far as one can know without checking in that destination,  the export has been successful.  A later check shows that no file was exported.  This can really catch you out badly.  Please consider a check for illegal characters and notify the user of the problem.

[Phil.E]

Hi,

Can you please provide an example of the illegal characters you refer to? Glad to test this and log any issues that arise, but I need an example. 

[HughesTooling]

@Phil.E  Here's what Windows gives me it I try to rename a file with an illegal character. 

Mark

[Phil.E]

Here's what windows does when I use illegal characters:

So clearly some are accepted, some are replaced with _ and some fail. This is why I'm asking for examples of those that fail. I was unable to use any that created a failed export.

[Swarfmaker]

I frequently fall into the trap of using " and / for indicating inch and the divisor of a fraction in the name of a component.  If I export that file to my local machine using either F360 or Step format nothing is found on my local machine - but F360 did not warn me that the exports had not been carried out.  So no messages but no exports either!

I found this out when doing a lot of backups.  Components with windows legal file names all exported but some were missing.  Turned out that it was the file name that prevented the export since Windows presumably flagged to F360 that the file name was invalid. The complaint is that F360 did not pass the message on to me the user!

Of course, I do not expect F360 to be able to successfully write to Windows with illegal characters - but I would like F360 to report that the file name contains them and therefore the file cannot be written locally.

[Phil.E]

Thanks. There is a ticket to improve this experience. You should be getting a warning of some kind if export is going to fail. Otherwise, upon export, it could replace the illegal character, which is fairly common practice.

(ref: FUS-92994)

[Swarfmaker]

Thank you very much @Phil.E !

[HughesTooling]

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@Phil.E wrote:

Here's what windows does when I use illegal characters:

So clearly some are accepted, some are replaced with _ and some fail. This is why I'm asking for examples of those that fail. I was unable to use any that created a failed export.

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Did you notice none of the characters in your example are in my screengrab? Don't know if these are different for mac users.

With most people I've seen with this problem's it been the slashes causing the problem and I guess could be converted to an underscore, seen several examples of this done to part numbers from suppliers.

Thanks Mark

[Phil.E]

I tried your characters.

Result:

But for STEP file export, nothing happens. Silent failure.  The Step file eventually appears after a minute or two. I'm using Windows.

As I mentioned above, there is a ticket for this and the team is looking at it. 

[HughesTooling]

@Phil.E  Do the slashes still fail? These are the ones I've seen most reports of failing to create exports in the past. 

I wonder if Fusion should warn people when they use one of these character that exporting could be a problem. Could be one of those warnings with a "do not show again" option. Just thinking about someone making a library of parts that might end up needing to rename every design if they wanted to export to STP, STL etc..

Thanks Mark

[Phil.E]

As my images show, I used all those characters to name an f3d and a step export.  I just tried again and the step file (with _______ as the name) appeared almost instantly. 

So I would appreciate a more concrete example, or confirmation that Mac handles it differently than Win10. This will cut down on the time required to reproduce the defect.

Thanks,