Adjust Sharepoint URL field length

Question

Is there anyway to change the length of the field that Sharepoint uses to store URLs. Its default is 255, which is just not long enough to hold links to content within the sharepoint site.

Delsiedelsman

Answer 1

No, this is a hard limit in SharePoint. Studying the schema of the content database reveals the limit originates from the primary key columns DirName and LeafName in the AllDocs table.

I recently worked on a project where this problem also surfaced because users tended to create deep folder structures with long folder names and long file names. We managed to work around the problem by shortening some URLs according to these guidelines:

• Prefer short URL names for sites and document libraries.
• For document libraries, start by creating them with a title you want as the URL and then rename the title to the display name of the library.
• Avoid excessively long folder names and file names.
• Avoid excessively deep folder structures in document libraries, better create a few more document libraries.

Horror

Answer 2

I believe this is a WebDAV restriction. See File Name, Length, Size and Invalid Character Restrictions and Recommendations for more info.

However I could see this being a potential problem for linking to external content (although hopefully rare).

Collide

Answer 3

changing the length of a SharePoint data type could be dangerous when it's time for an upgrade. I would recommend making a new Site Column that has the properties you are expecting.

Garvy

Answer 4

I've no idea how to solve this, I am having exactly the same problem, I found a hotfix for MOSS which will not work for WSS v3, it proposes to increase the length of the hyperlink field but is not compatable with WSSv3. It's a shame really.

Gametangium

What was the KB article for the hotfix? – Collide

Answer 5

You can't change it, but one work around is to shorten URLs when they can be shortened. Here is a free, online tool I wrote to do that:

http://qa76.net/shortener

It cannot help if the full document name goes over 255! But many times, the thing that has trouble is the view URLs that SharePoint makes. Those can be shortened, often dramatically.

More details on the page.

Tamtam