Custom fields - Brackets issue

[saws]

I noticed a very peculiar thing on Web acess of 2003..I was wondering if any
of you have noticed this before..

We had defined custom fields like ABC (XY) PQR. The indicators (light bulbs)
corresponding to these fields show up fine on the project center - project
view
But when I drill down to task level view, these indicators do not show up.
When I removed the brackets from the names of the custom fields, they showed
up alright. Just to be sure, I kept one custom field with the bracket and one
without. Only the one without showed up..

Any idea if this is a known problem??

Thank you!

 

[TGG]

I don't believe brackets are allowed characters which is probably why you are
seeing this behavior. The input validation on Project Pro needs to beefed up
in this matter so that people aren't inadvertently inserting invalid
characters into the database.

Also, using characters like this could create issues with OLAP or later
during an upgrade to the next version of Project.

TGG

 

[jonathan_sofer.....]

Do not use special characters /";:<>|[],.'?~`!$%^&*()-+={}\ anywhere
in your custom fields, outline codes, resource names as well as project
names. This will potentially cause issue with the OLAP cube as TGG
wrote, but could also cause strange behavior and possibly data
corruption later down the road. You might not see any issues now but
eventually it could cause major headaches for you as an implementer or
administrator of the tool trying to figure out what went wrong.

I believe the reason you cannot use special characters is that some of
them are used in SQL commands and could make the SQL hicup while
processing data. You might hit a certain combination of special
characters in a certain sequence that will cause SQL command problems.

 

[jonathan_sofer.....]

Do not use special characters /";:<>|[],.'?~`!$%^&*()-+={}\ anywhere
in your custom fields, outline codes, resource names as well as project
names. This will potentially cause issue with the OLAP cube as TGG
wrote, but could also cause strange behavior and possibly data
corruption later down the road. You might not see any issues now but
eventually it could cause major headaches for you as an implementer or
administrator of the tool trying to figure out what went wrong.

I believe the reason you cannot use special characters is that some of
them are used in SQL commands and could make the SQL hicup while
processing data. You might hit a certain combination of special
characters in a certain sequence that will cause SQL command problems.

Jonathan Sofer