In making some innocuous seeming changes to working code in Windows Azure, I ran into an Exception when creating a Queue – and the cause was not at first obvious. The exception message was “One of the request inputs is out of range” and the inner exception message was “The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.”

Illegal name causes “One of the request inputs is out of range”

Here is the code – why might this Windows Azure code snippet throw an Exception on the call to queue.CreateIfNotExist()?

CloudQueueClient queueStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
CloudQueue queue = queueStorage.GetQueueReference(“My Queue”);
bool queueJustCreated = queue.CreateIfNotExist();

The answer lies in the name we are using for the queue. Since the name is just a string, I assumed it can be any string. It cannot be any string.

Experimentation suggests the rules for naming a queue include: (a) use only lower case letters, (b) digits are allowed anywhere, and (c) internal single hyphens are okay too, but (d) name should not contain any spaces (e) nor any punctuation (other than hyphen).

So there would be no problem with valid names like:

  • myqueue
  • my-queue
  • myqueue-3

But there would be problems with illegal names like:

  • MyQueue
  • my queue
  • bill’squeue
  • -nogood
  • x-
  • not—quite
  • bad(name)

There may be additional nuances to the rules I didn’t discover, of course. One way to test out possible names quickly is with the myAzureStorage utility; just try to create a queue using the name and see if you get an error. Note that you can feed upper case chars to myAzureStorage but the created object will return with lower-case letter and will not cause an error.

Also, I only experimented with Queue names, but I assume the same rules apply to Blobs and Tables. Further research indicates this indeed is the case...

My challenge originally was to figure out why I got the Exception that was raised – that was the non-obvious part – the exception message did not tell me it was a problem with the name. After I figured it out and experimented a bit, of course then I found the documentation on allowed names which supports my conclusions… and adds details like length of name and the fact that the name is required to be a legal DNS name.

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