6 ms·
I was about to say "Which is essentially leaking the existence of something terrible inside. They should be embarrassed to say something like this in public. Li
by Brian_K_White 3y ago
I was about to say "Which is essentially leaking the existence of something terrible inside. They should be embarrassed to say something like this in public. Like saying you can't have %s or $PS1. Why the hell not? What are you doing with this user-supplied input?"
But maybe it's more about what everyone else might do with a channel name. Ie they might cut & paste it anywhere, and I guess windows users aren't expected to escape their own strings when pasted into cmd or powershell or wsl.
The teams code itself can probably handle it just fine, but maybe not all the unknown janky random things out there that might handle channel names.
Other people have pointed out the SharePoint folders associated with the channels. Not sure I would excuse that myself since it's easy enough to just escape or modify or encode to create a safe version for the directory, but maybe it's important elsewhere for the channel name and the directory name to be identical. Within one app you could simply encode and decode both the channel name and directory name the same way and totally hide the encoding from the user, but if the directory is used outside of the app, then it would look bad with URL encoding or something that everything else will just display as it is, not decoded.
So the directory has to be safe for everything else, and so the channel name has to be the same.
Essentially choosing to have these limits rather than have directory names that look ugly sometimes. It's ultimately not even a safety or breakage thing, just a cosmetic thing. All directories will always look natural and good, because they don't allow anything that would have needed to be encoded.
- thefz 3y ago> essentially leaking the existence of something terrible inside It's just a restriction imposed on SharePoint folder names bubbling up. Nothing fancy.
- BasedAnon 3y agoi was going to write a bunch of suggestions for solving the problem but then i remembered i hate microsoft
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 3y agoI at least upvoted. This is the most level headed and sane reaction to this article.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoName checks out.
- eastbound 3y agoThose should obviously be UUIDs. Labels and titles should be a simple changeable, internationalizable attribute. Like usernames. You don’t use usernames as primary keys for anything, do you? What happens when people marry?
- hardware2win 3y agoAnd what happens when you sync sharepoint to your windows files?
- SoftTalker 3y ago> You don’t use usernames as primary keys for anything, do you? HAHAHAHHHAAHAHA Seen this so many times I literally laughed out loud.
- yndoendo 3y agoWindows actually uses SIDs to map internal users to windows settings such as profile locations and group policies. Open regedit and under HKEY_USERS there will be the SID for your user account which maps to HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Linux has UIDs that map to the username. Both methods allow for changing the user name without having to change permissions on files. Both need manual manipulation to transition the user's folder name to the new username. Both also allow for creating a user folder that does not match the username. Example HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList on Windows. Best practice and reality are two different things. Even Microsoft often will use the fully qualified user profile path in their coding instead of %USERPROFILE%, example would be OneDrive. Just look at the Environment key in regedit for the current user.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago> You don’t use usernames as primary keys for anything, do you? Sure you do. Saves doing joins all over the place just to get someone's username. Makes hand writing SQL easier. Apply head to desk.
- jdwithit 3y agoExtremely relatable post. I worked someplace that had a policy of absolutely never changing your Active Directory username because it was the primary key in like a dozen internal systems. Someone finally made a massive stink about it to HR when their name had legally changed but IT was forcing them to use their old name (and they were absolutely right to complain. It was a ridiculous policy only in place due to terrible architecture). They still defaulted to telling people no but they did at least document all the highly tedious manual steps necessary to change the name in all affected systems if (when) another employee refused to take no for an answer. Was certainly a great lesson in schema design, among other things.
- gadders 3y agoIt goes lower than that. Try creating a directory called "LPT1" in DOS
- Brian_K_White 3y agoomg
- mihaaly 3y agoOr the terribleness falls one down very fancy?
- naikrovek 3y agothey're SharePoint limits, man. Teams is backed by SharePoint and it's not a secret, nor is it embarrassing.
- lostlogin 3y ago> nor is it embarrassing Isn’t it? The folders work fine on a Mac. Teams is not a things of beauty, and is rough as all hell for daily users.
- kbenson 3y agoIt isn't. Services have limitations, it's nothing new. This isn't about the portion of the app running on Mac, or Linux for that matter, this is because the app is backed by a service that has a name limitation and that bubbles up through teams names. In the end it's no different than if some service doesn't allow all numeric names or names to start with numerals or be too short, of which there are plenty of constraints on plenty of services.
- lostlogin 3y agoI think I expect more from my tools than you. I have a fair idea why the behaviour is there, I just don’t accept that it’s ok. There are problems large and small throughout the app and it really feels like someone went ‘close enough’ and called it done.
- recursive 3y ago> nor is it embarrassing I worked on a sharepoint project once. Let's just say I'm not putting it on my resume these days.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoI avoid putting stuff on my resume that I don't want to work on again. I just pretend to re-learn Sharepoint for every new job I have
- marcosdumay 3y ago> I guess windows users aren't expected to escape their own strings Eh... When did the users of any kind of system start to fit that expectation? And what is that utopia system?
- Brian_K_White 3y agoMaybe they do and maybe they don't, but I am certainly expected to deal with whatever the results might be if I paste something into a terminal. I know there exist terminals and shells that do try to be "helpful" and do auto-escape pastes, but that just breaks things that must not be modified, when the only reason you're pasting is because you need it to be an exact copy without any risk of human typos. Some are less invasive and just warn when there are included \n before proceeding, but do not presume to munge the data.
- m3047 3y ago> leaking the existence of something terrible inside If you should get the opportunity to look at a raw (DNS) NXDOMAIN passive DNS (PDNS) feed there's a lot of plain brokenness, but the nuggets can be truly alarming. This is what happens when translating between naming services: naming services typically have application domains, and names in one context are interpreted differently in another. Bobby Tables is well known, but how about that special file "-rf"? Was a time when the happy path for Active Directory essentially trusted DNS domain names implicitly for things like file shares. Sounds ok until you realize executable files might be on those "drives". (Honestly I don't find the string "MS-DOS" anywhere in that document.) (Edit: Did find the reference to e.g. CON, LPT1...)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- m3047 3y agoLooking at the list of characters and character ranges the omission of 7F is curious.
- inkyoto 3y agoIf my memory serves me well, 7F was historically used for the «Delete» key code, and outputting it on a real terminal (or in terminal emulator), would result in the in-place text deletion from the output. Not that it has been relevant in last 2-3 decades tho.
- paulddraper 3y agoAWS has character restrictions on virtually everything. The message bodies of SQS messages has restrictions on which whitespace characters can be used.
- SamuelAdams 3y agoI noticed this recently too. We set up alerts on cloud watch logs and I tried to put an emoji in the alert message, which delivers to an SNS topic, which goes to an email. And cloudformation complained loudly that there was an unsupported character in the alarm message.
- wizofaus 3y agoTry creating a value in a SharePoint choice column that has ;# in it, and you might not be so certain this isn't being done because MS don't trust their own code.
- nullindividual 3y ago;# is the Choice column separator value. That restriction makes sense in that context.
- wizofaus 3y agoBut it doesn't restrict you! You can create a choice field with a value that contains ;# and select it, but then it can't display correctly. Relatively minor bug as bugs go, but still...
- nullindividual 3y agoJust tried in SPO (modern UI) without issues.
- wizofaus 3y agoMight only be an issue for multichoice fields.