How To: Deal with Long Paths

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I recently encountered an issue when exporting documents out of a ProjectWise datasource and importing them into another datasource.  The issue encountered had to do with the long path names. ProjectWise doesn’t care how long the path is to a folder or document. However, Windows does. There is a hard limit of 260 characters.

The following is one way to work around this limitation. The process was broken down into two steps.

First: Export the ProjectWise documents to the local drive without recreating the folder path and create an Excel spreadsheet to capture the full folder path, name, etc.

Second: Import the ProjectWise documents into the secondary ProjectWise datasource using the information within the Excel spreadsheet to recreate the folder structure.

Exporting documents from ProjectWise:

# Parameters
    [string] $PWFolder = 'Projects\BSI200 - Peterborough Geospatial Investigation Parent',
    [string] $ExportFolder = 'D:\Temp\testExport',
    [string] $OutputFile = "$ExportFolder\Output.xlsx"    

    $docs = Get-PWDocumentsBySearch -FolderPath $PWFolder -GetAttributes -Verbose

    #Create datatable
    $dt = New-Object System.Data.DataTable ('ExportDocs')
    $Columns = 'DocName', 'DocDesc', 'FullPath', 'ProjectID', 'ExportFolder'

    foreach ($Column in $Columns){
        $dt.Columns.Add($Column)
    }

    foreach ($doc in $docs) {
        # Create new datarow
        $dr = $dt.NewRow()
        
        $dr['DocName'] = $doc.Name
        $dr['DocDesc'] = $doc.Description
        $dr['FullPath'] = $doc.FullPath.Substring(0, $doc.FullPath.LastIndexOf('\'))   
        $dr['ProjectID'] = $doc.ProjectID
        $dr['ExportFolder'] = $ExportFolder
    
        # Add datarow to datatable
        $dt.Rows.Add($dr)
        
        CheckOut-PWDocuments -InputDocument $doc -CopyOut -ExportFolder $ExportFolder -NoReferences -Verbose
    }
    New-XLSXWorkbook -InputTables $dt -OutputFileName $OutputFile -Open -Verbose

Importing documents into ProjectWise:

# Parameters
    [string] $ImportFolder = 'D:\Temp\testExport',
    [string] $ImportFile = "$ImportFolder\Output.xlsx"

    # Import document information from spreadsheet created on export.
    $FromXLS = Get-TablesFromXLSXWorkbook -InputFileName $ImportFile -Verbose

    foreach ($item in $FromXLS.Rows) {
        try {
            Get-PWFolders -FolderPath $item.FullPath -JustOne -ErrorAction Stop
        } catch {
            New-PWFolder -FolderPath $item.FullPath -Verbose
        } # end try/catch

        try{
            Get-PWDocumentsBySearch -FolderPath $item.FullPath -DocumentName  $item.DocName -JustThisFolder -Verbose -ErrorAction Stop
            Write-Warning -Message ("Document '{0}' already exists in folder {1}" -f $item.DocName, $item.FullPath)
        } catch {
            New-PWDocument -FolderPath $item.FullPath -FilePath "$($item.ExportFolder)\$($item.DocName)" -Description $item.DocDesc -Verbose 
        } # try/catch

    } # end foreach($item...

Example Output to Excel Spreadsheet:

DocName : BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation.pdf
DocDesc : Concat2.pdf
FullPath : Projects\BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation
Parent\BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation SubFolder
1\BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation SubFolder 2
ProjectID : 3557
ExportFolder : D:\Temp\testExport

DocName : BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation 3.pdf
DocDesc : Concat2.pdf
FullPath : Projects\BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation
Parent\BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation SubFolder
1\BSI200 – Peterborough Geospatial Investigation SubFolder 2\BSI200
– Peterborough Geospatial Investigation SubFolder 3
ProjectID : 3558
ExportFolder : D:\Temp\testExport