File Storage Case Sensitivity

[jmirtsch]

Many popular file/folder storage systems are case insensitive.

It's extremely unlikely, but there is a possible guid clash that could occur as a result of this.

[mtveerman]

Unpacking the IfcGuid to the original guid might do the trick?

[jmirtsch]

Yes, that would work at the expense of longer file paths.

[tomas-polach]

Using git to collaboratively manage IFC data would enable we as a 3d web app dev to use this format online via URLs (awesome!) My experience with filenames:

• case insensitivity in filenames I have been bitten by this a few times.
  i.e. accidental use of lower case to reference a filename including upper case characters: works on most file systems (mistake will go unnoticed) but when fetching the same file via URL (case sensitive) it will fail. a solution could be to default to lower case characters?

• special characters in filenames bites quite often because forgetting to encode/decode URLs happens easily. maybe this could be avoided by substituting non-url chars? . i.e https://www.npmjs.com/package/slug

[jmirtsch]

Case insensitivity can be avoided by using uncompressed guids. The drawback is human ability to identify the model but probably this is a lower priority. Now that implicit aggregation is used, long path lengths are not really an issue.

Ifc already uses encoding in STEP to handle special characters and this is already included in the implementation.

[jmirtsch]

One aspect of this, I'm reluctant to use conventional guids as many of the popular BIM applications fudge the compressed guid and it's doesn't translate. I would be happy to enable a configuration option where the repository could elect to use one or the other. I think the guid clash is pretty unlikely, especially given the element class name is included in the folder.