Currently, the internal id’s of knx entities are generated using the slugify function and it isn’t possible to manually configure entity id’s for these entities.
It should be possible to (optionally) configure the internal id’s for knx entities in the entities configuration. With that option, some current problems with auto-generated id’s could be avoided:
- Changing the display name of an entity also changes the internal id in most cases. This is likely to break scripts and automations, where these entities are used, if these id’s aren’t changed accordingly.
- Auto-generated entity id’s tend to become inconveniently long and hard to remember because of long display names. Sometimes they get heavily slugified as well, leading to additional problems:
- Changes to the slugify function (as just happened) are likely to change auto-generated entity id’s as well. Again, this leads to broken automations and scripts.
- Auto-generated id’s aren’t easy to predict. Ok, with some experience they aren’t very hard to predict either, but you get the point. This often leads to an unnecessary complicated workflow when defining new entities to be used in automations or scripts:
- configure a new entity
- restart HA
- determine the auto-generated internal id of the new entity
- configure scripts and automations
- reload automations and scripts (or restart HA again)
I’d like to propose an optional id: configuration variable for all KNX component entities to define internal id’s independent from the display name.