Naming conventions

This section lists the requirements for naming various workflow-related items.

Workflow definitions

The name of a workflow definition must conform to the following rules:

Begin with an alphabetic character. Can contain letters, digits, underscores, or spaces.
Maximum length 249 characters.
Not use F_ or two tilde (~~) characters as the first two characters.
Be unique among workflow definitions in an isolated region.

Tip: Workflow names that begin or end with spaces might be difficult to find when performing a search.

Ensure that all names:

Begin with an alphabetic character.
Contain only letters, digits, and underscores; no spaces or special characters.
Not use F_ or VWV as the first characters.
Contain 30 characters or less - attachments, operations, rule sets, workflow groups, and workflow steps. For DB2®, the maximum length of the index name is 18 characters.
For any call to any workflow system API, event logs, queues, rosters, field names, and index names can contain up to 128 characters or less. However, for event logs, queues, rosters, field names, and index names, the workflow system generates a corresponding database view name with a distinctive prefix which must be contained within the 30 character limit. If you specify a name for one of these items that is longer than 23 characters, the view name is truncated. If you create another item with the same name for the first 19 characters and differentiated by the final few characters, that view name is also truncated and the end of the name is an internally generated number (0001, 0002, and so on). These database view names are generated by the system so the truncation is not a problem. If you have applications that need the actual name of the database view for a query, it will be easier to determine which item to query if you use shorter names.

In addition, you cannot use any of the following reserved words for a name:

Table 1. Table of reserved words
Reserved word	Reserved word	Reserved word
abs adddays addhours addminutes addmonths addseconds addyears alt_field_defined and attachment arraystring bitand bitnot bitor blue boolean color convert currency date datetostring days_between decode dist_bernoulli dist_beta dist_binomial dist_exponential dist_gamma dist_geometric dist_lognormal dist_normal dist_poisson dist_uniform dist_weibull document elementcount encode	envfield err_encode false field_defined float folder green hex if in_set int is_date is_null is_number is_time is_valid is_validxml is_wellformed len integer lower ltrim max min mod nextelement not null number numbertostring or random red repeat rtrim seconds_between selection	sizeof stringtodate stringtotime string strins strloc substitute substr systemdate systemenvfield systemtime time timetostring translate trim true unsigned upper userenvfield userid weekday xmlinsertbefore xmlinsertafter xmlinsertchildfirst xmlinsertchildlast xmlremove xmlrename xmlbooleanexpr xmlintegerexpr xmlfloatexpr xmlstringexpr xmlstringarray xmltransform xmlemcode xmldecode

On Windows-based systems, the following characters are not allowed: