Data Naming Requirements

This page covers naming restrictions and guidelines for volumes, files, and folders for an optimal experience with the Genomic Data Store.

Volumes

• Volume name must start and end with lowercase letter or number

• Volume name must be between 3 and 63 characters, inclusive

• Volume name may contain lowercase letters, numbers, dashes, and periods

• Volume name cannot contain underscores, end with a dash, have consecutive periods, or use dashes adjacent to periods

• Volume name cannot be formatted as an IP address (e.g., 191.21.0.1)

• Volume names must be unique within a tenant

Files and Folders

You can use any UTF-8 character in file and folder names. However, using certain characters in these names may cause problems with some applications and protocols. The following guidelines help maximize compliance with DNS, web-safe characters, XML parsers, and other APIs.

Safe Characters

The following character sets are generally safe for use in file and folder names:

• Alphanumerics

• Exclamation points, hyphens, underscores, periods, apostrophes, parentheses

The following are examples of valid file/folder names:

4my-team
my.great_photo-2016/feb/myvacation.jpg
videos/2014/birthday6video1.wmv

Characters That Might Require Special Handling

The following characters in a key name might require additional code handling and likely will need to be URL encoded or referenced as HEX. Some of these are non-printable characters and your browser might not handle them, which also requires special handling:

• Ampersand ("&")

• Dollar sign ("$")

• ASCII character ranges 00–1F hex (0–31 decimal) and 7F (127 decimal)

• 'At' symbol ("@")

• Equals ("=")

• Semicolon (";")

• Colon (":")

• Plus ("+")

• Space – Significant sequences of spaces may be lost in some uses (especially multiple spaces)

• Question mark ("?")

Characters to Avoid

Avoid the following characters in a key name because of significant special handling for consistency across all applications.

• Comma (",") (NOTE: Usage of comma will give unexpected filtering results)

• Astrisk ("*") (NOTE: Usage of asterisk will give unexpected filtering results)

• Backslash ("")

• Left curly brace ("{")

• Non-printable ASCII characters (128–255 decimal characters)

• Caret ("^")

• Right curly brace ("}")

• Percent character ("%")

• Grave accent / back tick ("`")

• Right square bracket ("]")

• Quotation marks

• 'Greater Than' symbol (">")

• Left square bracket ("[")

• Tilde ("~")

• 'Less Than' symbol ("<")

• 'Pound' symbol ("#")

• Vertical bar / pipe ("|")