eliasen - The specified path, file name, or both are too long.

Sunday, 14 October 2007

The specified path, file name, or both are too long.

The other day I published an orchestration of mine as a web service. Not a big deal. Then, I needed to export the MSI for my application, so I could install it on the test server. Now THAT was a Big Deal! :-)

I got this one:

A really silly restriction on a quite normal Windows Server 2003 R2 - as you can see, the entire path of a file, including the filename, must be less than 260 characters long. And the path itself must be less than 248 characters long.

This had me stunned for a moment, until I took a closer look at what file creation was the issue. It turns out, that the issue was with creating temporary files in c:\documents and settings\administrator\local settings\temp. Yes, I am logged in as administrator. No, I wouldn't normally do that. Quit asking these questions, and let me finish the post! Right. Then I got clever, if I might say so myself (nobosy else is saying it, so I suppose I have to do it myself :-) )... Turns out that the temporary files are created in the %TMP% (NOT the %TEMP% one...) directory. So what to do? Simple - change the %TMP% environment variable to point at c:\tmp in stead of c:\documents and settings\administrator\local settings\temp. That's what I did, and it worked. I got my MSI file.

BUT... Well... You know that sometimes you do something that is like peeing in your pants? At first it is warm, but then it just gets cold and nasty? Well, this is like that. Because when I then took the MSI file to the test server and tried to install it (not the import part, but the install part), I got the exact same error. The default installation path is C:\Program Files\Generated by BizTalk\ - which is also a rather long path. So in order to install my application, I ended up installing it to c:\biz. Now having to tell your customer that they can't install the application to a path longer than 5 characters really isn't an option.

So my clever and very nice workaround to just set the TMP environment variable to c:\tmp in order to generated the MSI file really wasn't all that clever, since the installation wasn't acceptable at all. Had the issue just been my own developers box, I wouldn't have minded... but now I have to go rename all artefacts anyway. Bugger!

So basically, this post is written for people looking for a workaround for the error they get with long filenames/paths. My suggestion: Rename your artefacts, and don't wet your pants! :-)