Automatically apprend or prepend names of files uploaded with date or random number in SharePoint

file sharepoint naming uploading
theriomorphic picture theriomorphic · Mar 5, 2012 · Viewed 8.5k times · Source

I have somehow turned into the person to oversee my organization's SharePoint and I have been tasked with finding a way that when a file is uploaded to any of our document libraries the file name of said file is either prepended, appended with a date or random string in an effort to prevent naming collisions.

I understand that SharePoint will block uploading files with the same name but I would like to just apprend or prepend a date or string to the file name to just bypass the whole issue. Our users aren't the most tech savvy so to automatically rename their files for them would help us and them both.

Is there a way to do this currently in SharePoint's settings? I've looked into versioning and Document ID but neither prevent the naming issues so far. Is there a plug-in of some sort I could use? or do I need to have code written by someone and have it added to SharePoint?

Thanks!

Answer

Nat picture Nat · Mar 5, 2012

The Content Organizer feature of SharePoint 2010 allows you to set a duplicate submissions tag to documents.

"Duplicate Submissions This option specifies whether to use SharePoint versioning or append unique characters to the end of duplicate file names if a document is uploaded that has the same name as a document that is already in the destination library."

Play around with this to see if it is going to help before worrying about a more complex coded solution. Your users may also appreciate the drop box approach to document uploading.

Related questions

Best way to resolve file path too long exception

I created a app that downloads all document libraries in a SP Site , but at one point it giving me this error (I tried looking at google but couldn;t find anything, now if anyone knows any trick to solve …

Read More
How do I check whether a file exists without exceptions?

How do I check if a file exists or not, without using the try statement?

Read More
How to read a file line-by-line into a list?

How do I read every line of a file in Python and store each line as an element in a list? I want to read the file line by line and append each line to the end of the list.

Read More