What is the best way to handle breaking changes to sensors?

Development
#1

I’m working on a new integration so I make fixes or just change my mind about the best way to expose something fairly regularly. When I do that anyone running the integration sees the left over sensors etc. and has to manually delete them. In some cases the sensors collide on identity and HA automatically adds and _2 and in my experience of trying to clean that up by deleting the dead original and renaming the new sensor, it seems to persist knowledge and sometimes repetitively re-duplicates the sensor going forward. I’ve also had reports that renaming the device sometimes results in the entire device being duplicated but I haven’t been able to reproduce this myself yet.

I’m looking for a couple of pieces of advice:

  • Is there a way / pattern to allow me to clean up dead/deprecated sensors?
  • What might I be messing up that’s causing that duplicated device issue?

Code is at:
greghesp/ha-bambulab: A Home Assistant Integration for Bambu Lab Printers (github.com)

#2

Did the unique id’s change?

#3

For device rename repro, no. The unique ids are fixed in code and generated from unchanging data (device serials).

Other cases, yes - that’s why I’m wondering what I can do make upgrades cleaner for folk. Most of the sensors are setup with:
self.attr_unique_id = f"{printer.serial}{description.key}"

In one case I had a typo in the key so the unique id changed which generated a new sensor and orphaned the old one as expected. But even after deleting the dead sensor the duplication seemed to keep coming back somehow. I never worked out what was going on before the point where I removed and re-added the integration and lost that repro. I don’t think that was an example of the _2 case though since I changed the key.

#4

Look in .storage/core.config_entries and see what the difference is between the original and _2 entry.

In my case it was a changed unique id. You might need to call async_update_entity if it’s something else.