Naming standards for our SharePoint columns Internal names

Question

I am working on a new SharePoint site, and we want to create many site columns, so can i know what are the naming standards for site columns' Internal Names inside SharePoint, for example i have those display names:-

1. Car Number
2. Registration Name
3. Date Covered By Customer

so what the internal names for those site columns need to be? if we take the 3rd column as an example should it be defined as DateCoveredByCustomer OR Datecoveredbycustomer OR datecoveredbycustomer or another option?? as based on my test internal names for SharePoint sites column are case sensitive.. any advice? thanks

Answer 1

What you are doing with your three examples are all perfectly valid.

DateCoveredByCustomer Datecoveredbycustomer datecoveredbycustomer

It's pure semantics.

Personally, I like your first example. Where the first letter of each word is capitalized. I believe some people call that camel case.

Answer 2

According to my test, these three columns should be defined as Car_x0020_Number, Registration_x0020_Name, Date_x0020_Covered_x0020_By_x0020_Customer.

Note: Internal name for SharePoint column is case sensitive.

Internal names are set once at the point of creation; you cannot change them later. Additionally, Internal names encode special characters in your display name including spaces not in the same way as URLs, they use a combination of underscores and x0 numbers to represent the character, for example:

• x0020 for " "
• x003a for ":"

For more information, please see the SharePoint Naming Guidelines.

Here is an identical case：

• Naming standards for our SharePoint columns Internal names

Answer 3

Some Information as the best practice while creating site column in SharePoint

1. Always create columns without spaces in the name. It becomes useful when trying to use those names from another app like Powershell, power automated and etc.
2. Site column internal names with special characters are get encoded in SharePoint. e.g for " " is replaced with x0020 OR for ":" replaced with x003a
3. Site column internal names cannot be changed once created.
4. Internal names are limited to a specific length of up to 255 Characters in SharePoint Online

Hope this information is useful.