Device names shouldn't contain special charachters?

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1

(feel free to move if not in right cat)

Lots of integrations seem to add special characters like brackets in their device names. This is well and good EXCEPT for the fact that if you then try to change the device name, the entitiy names won’t change because they’re different.
Take for example the HomeWizard integration (this is just an example, there are others as well):
They create devices like “KWh meter 3-phase (5c21zsr9eh6)” which then has entities like:

sensor.kwh_meter_3_phase_5c21zsr9eh6_active_power
sensor.kwh_meter_3_phase_5c21zsr9eh6_active_power_phase_1
.....

BUT because those brackets aren’t in the entity names. If you change the device name, they won’t change with.

I think it’s related to the brackets in the name somehow?

2

Is there a question in here somehow? Friendly names can have all the special characters you like, entity id’s cannot. All special characters are replaced by _ but that shouldn’t matter because the ids don’t show up in the user interface.

3

Yeah, the question is just:
Is it normal that you add a device and it has a device id that doesn’t allow you to change the entitiy id’s automatically.

Like normally, most things i add to HA. when i change the device name, I get this prompt

image
image1024×408 16.7 KB

But now I’m not getting it. So i can’t change the entity names in bulk. even though I feel I should be able to. something is going wrong here

4

Hadn’t noticed. As a workaround you could try change the name to the _ version first, and then to the name you actually want. That might get around it quicker than naming all entities by hand.

5

ok. so I had tried that. and it didn’t work. now i tried it again and now it worked it again… :man_shrugging:

But yeah. It’s still a bad UX that I hope they fix.

The reason why I made this thread was cause I was wondering: is this on the HomeWizard integration devs for making a default name that doesn’t (can’t, because of the brackets) match the entity id’s.
Or is this on HA themselves?

6

You aren’t getting that if your entities do not have the device name in the accompanied entities. The system only changes entity_id’s that contain the device name in them. This is true for all integrations created & managed by the UI. So if you manually changed entity_id’s in that device to not include the device name, then that message will not appear.

It’s built this way so you don’t mess up your automations accidentally.

7

These were freshly added, I hadn’t changed the entity id’s themselves.

8

Then that seems like an issue with the integration that you used. What integration?

9

I’ve had it with some other integration as well. Don’t remember which one.

But yeah, just noticed there is an issue for the particular integration in question here for this:

(thought I had checked already but forgot it seems)