Project file naming

Just like making sure your folder structure is organized in a logical way, your file naming must follow a logical pattern to be successful. We've all been there, running geoprocesses all day, sometimes tweaking settings multiple times. At the end, you see all the files with the suffixes _export, _export2, _clip, _merge, and so on, and if you have a program crash or a forced restart, you will have a hard time trying to figure out which one you were using. Forcing yourself to take the five seconds to change the filename to something more descriptive will save many seconds/minutes/hours down the line. What I show will be a guide; change it as you need to, and just remember to be consistent!

My four keys to file naming:

• No spaces or special characters
• Use camel case or snake case
• When including a date, use a date prefix like yyyymmdd
• If processing data, enter the process name and any major settings (for example, 20171002_City_Limits_Buffer_10mi)

While today's software is smart enough to ignore spaces or special characters, there is still legacy software that will fail because of them. An added benefit of not using spaces is when you send a network path of a file or folder to someone, a link will automatically be generated in most email clients. If there is a space in the URL, it may create a link using all the characters up to the space, creating an invalid link. Use camel or snake case for legibility, and when appropriate, use the yyyymmdd date prefix. Having the date in that format allows you to sort by name and have the dated data show chronologically. Finally, putting in the process name with major settings allows you to quickly and easily find the particular data you processed. Now that we have thought about our folder structure and file-naming conventions, let's put them to use by finding data to populate our project!