Hyphen restriction on Groups/Users/Policy Names

[pwjw]

Is there a reason why we can't have spaces in Groups/Users/Policy Names? Using a hyphen makes it look awful when you have hundreds of entries...

[support200]

We usually don't allow special characters or spaces when we deal with some kind of ID and these names can be used as ID internally.

[pwjw]

We usually don't allow special characters or spaces when we deal with some kind of ID and these names can be used as ID internally.

Surely this is a name/description field not an id? Is there not a numerical, auto increment ID on the rows?

[support200]

We have numeric ID for database. If you only think about web development involving database and GUI, you may use such ID for everything. However, we use usernames for in-memroy map and lookup because we get usernames from Windows and user input and many sources for login and user tracking and many things. These usernames are keys between NxFilter and other systems including Active Directory.

We don't want to test everything possibly breaking these map and lookup structure. So, we stay away from using '-' or other special characters. In most programming languages, '-' is not allowed in variable names and you also can't use it in Windows username. We just respect and follow general rules.