Feature or Bug? Friendly Name changed in GUI

I rename entities friendly name with a " - " between words.

Such as Kitchen - Lamp
I then add it to the Area Kitchen
In the UI Kitchen Area card, I get a device called " - Lamp".

This only occurs if the first word is the same as the area. I’ve looked around in the documentation, but have not yet found that this is a feature.

Feature or a bug?

I vote: Bug.

Before I report bug. Can someone try to see if they can reproduce it?

It’s a feature of automated UI. If the area name is in the friendly name, the area will be removed from the friendly name in the UI when using auto generated UI.

Oh!
Thank you for the reply.
So it’s only the auto UI and not custom lovelace dashboards?

Can it be turned off?

Nope, can’t be turned off. If you just named it Kitchen Lamp your area card would have have Kitchen at the top and Lamp as a row item.

You could just take control of the UI and then add them manually to each card in the UI.

Undocumented and unsolicited removal of user’s text.

A feature indistinguishable from a bug. :man_shrugging:

2 Likes

You’ll be surprised to hear that many people applauded this when it was added.

Ok. I was worried about that.

The only UI showing everything and supports dynamic groups, automatically removes text. And Lovelace doesn’t support area_id.

Between rock and a hard place :confused:

Kudos for undocumented behavior that alters labels? I guess I missed that drunken party.

4 Likes

Lemme know when you find the docs for the auto populated Lovelace.

Also it doesn’t edit the friendly names, just the display in the UI.

Probably next to the docs for Device Trigger. :wink:

1 Like

Nope :wink: MIA

tbh, I can’t even remember if the legacy UI had it’s auto adding and removing documented.

I’d call that a placeholder for Device Trigger. It uses several options and none are documented. In fairness, no one is supposed to be manually tinkering with them …

Anyway, suppressing the display of select parts of a friendly_name seems like something the end-user ought to control as opposed to the system. However, that ship has sailed so all hail " - Lamp".

1 Like

Well, they can control it, just not with the auto interface. It’s meant for people putting x number of devices in an area and the output ends up with an entities card titled Area Name, while the contents do not contain Area Name. For example, would you want a entities card with the title Kitchen and 4 entities: Kitchen Lights, Kitchen Temperature, Kitchen Switch, and Kitchen Motion? Or would you want a Kitchen card with Lights, Temperature, Switch, and Motion?

Oh!
Can lovelace read the area_id of an entity_id?
That would of course solve it with filtering. Care to share a link with example?

Forwarded the bulb to a HomeKit bridge and all that came along was “- light”. So something more is changing than just GUI

I hate when software is trying to be smart and developer thinks he knows better than the user.
BTW it’s not the first feature here implemented because “it’s better for us” without option to disable it.

In general I’m not against such features. The more the better. But it should be a configurable option. Right now it looks like it has been developed already so we have accept the fact it’s usefull for us

Man you just hunt for pitchforks, huh?