Microsoft has announced that the subscribers to both its OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online programs will find that the maximum available path lengths for their URLs have been expanded.
Up until now, the maximum length of the URL paths for these two programs was 256 of the Unicode code units, with this set to be increased pretty considerably under the terms of Microsoft’s new upgrade. From now on, those who make use of these products will find that they have 400 Unicode code units available to them. The expansion was confirmed by the software giant earlier this month, when it released a statement detailing the changes.
It represents a further enhancement to the URLs, with Microsoft having added % and # character support for its SharePoint Online product during April, stated one of its OneDrive and SharePoint senior product market managers, Bill Baer. However, the newly increased limit for the maximum URL path lengths will only be applied to those URLs that are non-encoded, with Baer going on to add that neither OneDrive for Business nor SharePoint Online would have limits for URLs that are encoded.
It is also only these two products that will feature this increased maximum path length, which means that those enterprises that deploy SharePoint Server will find that they still have the old URL path length limit. That 256 Unicode code unit length was originally revealed in an article on TechNet and is apparently the same for both the 2013 and 2010 versions of this server.
Enterprises that frequently make use of non-alphanumeric ASCII characters when inputting URLs are the ones likely to find these changes of most relevance. Among these nonstandard options are characters that involve double-byte Unicodes, such as those featured in the Hindi, Korean, Japanese and Chinese languages. Using these when it comes to website URLs leads to a 9-factor increase in their lengths during the process of encoding. The same article in TechNet that clarified the maximum SharePoint Server URL path limits also stated that using such characters as # and %, which are high ASCII ones, leads to a three-factor increase in length when it comes to encoding.
Some of those who use SharePoint Online are likely to be delighted by this enhanced maximum URL path length, but it is uncertain as to what degree the previous length limit impacted enterprises. Only a handful of requests can be found at the user voice forum for SharePoint, with one of those being from a user who was having difficulty with lengthened URLs and Japanese file names. A second voice request stated that switching to a more recent SharePoint Online version was not making inputting longer URLs very easy, while a third questioned the need for the limit on URL path lengths to exist.
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