To adhere to the OData specification, you must follow rules for allowed characters in certain circumstances. Some rules restrict use of characters used as separators or delimiters, or for encoding or spacing.

To work around this and allow the same restricted character sets elsewhere (for example, in the Type and Attribute Management utility), the PTC FlexPLM OData service uses a new encoding system. The encoding is similar to percent encoding. It uses the hex value of the character and places an underscore character (U+005f) prefix and suffix to the value instead of using a percentage character as a prefix.

For example, the full stop character (U+002E) is the common dot used in type internal names such as com.ptc.SolidColors_Color. The underscore (U+005F) is double encoded.

The PTC FlexPLM encoded values become _2e_ and _5f_, so the converted internal type name becomes com_2e_ptc_2e_SolidColors_5f_Color.