Spec proposal: naming media files

[Grzesiek2010]

Thanks @Thalie for sharing your thoughts!

@Thalie

I would actually favour a uuid() prefix with a now() suffix, mostly because my understanding is that the primary need for end-users would be to easily (visually) see what media are associated with a specific record in the ODK database, while ensuring uniqueness.

Our aim is to find a good balance between file names that will be unique and relatively short and meaningful. That's why by default I thought about adding a suffix with a few random numbers. There are different projects in terms of size and needs. In case of huge projects we want to allow doing things like you described (uuid + timestamp or anything else) and for very small projects we also want to allow disabling any suffixes but not by default. It would be a decision people responsible for creating forms would need to make.

@Thalie

I wish you were right, but actually this is much less unlikely that you would think - I have had several cases where participant names where corrected at a later point of the form filling process (also considering names can be a fluid concept in certain contexts).

Yes this seems to be important. If we decided to implement this feature without a mechanism for keeping those file names updated it could do more harm than good in some cases.