Can I use slashes and special characters in project and plot names?

Naming freely

Project and plot names in Buildsnapper are free text: letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, slashes, ampersands, apostrophes — use whatever your site plan and your assessor use. Matching your assessor's plot references exactly ("Plot 12/14", "The Old Barn, Phase 2") is worth more than any naming restriction, and the app is built so you do not have to compromise.

The one rule the app does enforce: project names must be unique on your account, so a report can never be attributed to the wrong project. Plot names are yours to manage — keeping them unique within a project avoids confusion in the reports list, though the app does not force it.

What happens to special characters in filenames

The report's filename is built from the project and plot names (in the pattern Project_Name--Plot_Name.pdf, with spaces becoming underscores). Since / and \ cannot appear in a filename, the app substitutes a - for them there — so "Plot 12/14" produces a file named ..._12-14.pdf. That substitution is filename-only: the report's cover page, the email subject (when you send from the plot) and every other display show the name exactly as you typed it, slash intact. A re-send from the Reports page takes the names from the file, so its email shows "12-14".

The legacy note — if a report will not generate

Older versions of the app did not make that substitution, and a name containing / or \ caused report generation to fail outright — the send stopped with "Unable to create the report. It has NOT been sent." on both platforms. Nothing was harmed (the failure was honest — nothing partial went out), but the report could not be produced at all.

If you hit this today:

1. Update Buildsnapper from the App Store or Play Store. Current versions generate slash-named reports without issue.
2. Do not rename the plot as a workaround unless you cannot update — renaming deletes the plot's existing reports (see the renaming article) and costs you a re-send you do not need.
3. After updating, send again from the plot — it will complete normally.

Other characters, for completeness

• Emoji and unusual symbols in names are stored and displayed faithfully, and kept in the filename too: only / and \ are changed there. Assessors' systems vary in how they render them, so plain names travel best.
• Leading/trailing spaces are effectively invisible and cause mismatched-looking duplicates — avoid them.
• Very long names work but produce unwieldy filenames and email subjects; your assessor will thank you for "Plot 7" over a sentence.