Entity Renaming Isn't Working

Configuration
1

Hey all, I’m having an issue on my HA install recently. I’ve added a few new z-wave devices. Normally, I add them, they get named something generic, I rename them and click the “yes” to rename entities and everything gets updated to reflect the new name, no problem.

When I’ve gone through this process the last couple of days, however, I am not being given the option to rename the entities at all. So I end up with a device that has a friendly name like “office switch” but all the entities are still named the extremely generic and unhelpful “dimmer_paddle_switch”. I also confirmed that this seems to be the case with other devices too, not just z-wave devices. My install is fully up to date and I cannot seem to find any other mention of this issue happening… am I doing something wrong?

Also, in case anyone with better development skills than me sees this, it would be extremely helpful if there would be a prompt when adding a new device where you can put in the name you want to give it so you don’t have to rely on renaming things after the fact to avoid having hundreds of entities with extremely generic names.

2

In regards to entities not being renamed automatically, have you tried restarting HA to see if that clears it up?

As for your request, you should spilt that off to a feature request (and make sure you vote for it).

3

Yep, I’ve restarted homeassistant a few times, nothing has changed. I haven’t fully rebooted the VM yet, I guess I’ll try that next, but I don’t really expect it to make a difference especially since I don’t even get the option to update the entity names anymore when renaming a device.

Yeah, right you are, I should know better about posting a feature request in addition to a troubleshooting post.

1 Like
4

Yeah, lately a full reboot solves a lot of problems. I use Container and I’ve found that sometimes just doing a full restart of the container takes care of weird websicket oddities.

5

Unfortunately, even the full reboot hasn’t helped. Even tried renaming a device after the reboot, still don’t get the “do you want to rename the entities” prompt and all my entities still have their unhelpful generic names.

6

Make sure the “Advanced” toggle in your user profile is turned on.

7

Huh, it was not toggled. That’s odd, since I’m sure that I’ve done the whole “Rename device, automatically rename entities” thing before. Is that a new(er) setting or something?

8

Nope, been the case for as long as I can remember (years). Maybe you accidentally disabled it?

Not sure why renaming entities is an “advanced” feature. That whole setting is a mystery and hopefully it will be revamped at some point.

9

Very strange, I guess I must have.

Anyway, with that ticked back on, I was now able to rename my entities as expected (though I had to rename the device back to the default value and rename it again for it to actually rename them as expected)

For anyone else that stumbles on this, would appreciate if you voted for the related feature request I submitted: Prompt for Name When Adding a Device

10

My entities are not being renamed either. I have advanced used ticked on and do get the option to rename entities during renaming the device. It’s simply not doing it. I thought each device and entity has a unique ID and surely it’s just a case of a database containing a string that is substituted each time the entity appears? I’d hate to think that the name is stored literally alongside each entity in the database.

Later: Oh… hold on. They’re being renamed as part of the “Entity ID” but not as the Entity Name. Ok just a bit of a misleading description that’s all. To me the Entity ID should be the UID.