Nothing is a requirement for anything. The entire point of this month is to post our frustrations that we would like to be solved, not to litigate every minor implementation detail that might be required. Entity names are a huge frustration that break easily.
6 Likes
For bonus points, make this work for Node-RED as well!
i.e. I change an entity in HA and it either gets flagged or simply updated in Node-RED.
I do all of my automations in NR and this would certainly save some self-induced bugs.
GUIDs for all!
1 Like
Totally agree that this should be a part of the core functionality. The lack of this feature was a reason I’ve created a custom integration which does similar thing.
Agreed here
I think this is important especially I just found that if you rename an entity ID the new group helpers don’t pick that up. This is annoying as when using groups in yaml you could at least search/replace the yaml but if you use groups in the UI you can’t do that anymore. (The workaround for groups is goigng to Developer Tools → State and filtering on attributes)
A workaround for this when a sensor is used in automations would be to use a helper group of one. It may only make sense when you use a sensor in multiple autiomations, but at least you’d only have to change the sensor in the helper group and not in all of your automations.
Not sure if it has been mentioned, but when renaming devices and you get the “Rename” button for the entities, I’d like to see a preview of the renamed entity ids that you can change. On multiple occasions HA messed things up because the old entity_id was not quite right.
3 Likes
make a separate wth please
Any updates here? I need to rename a number of entities, and I dread trying to track down all the automations I have to fix. Seems like basic functionality that should NOT break. I’m used to the Hubitat hub, where you can rename almost anything and it has no functional impact to automations, scenes, etc. I suspect they use back-end GUIDs.
Just use find and replace that checks multiple files. Notepad++, vscode, etc
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Just to find a middle point (because I don’t want my entity names automatically updated to anything, when I set an entity in a scene is because I want that scene to activate whatever entity has that name at the scene trigger moment), I think there could be a tool that shows you options, lets you manually select when you are changing a device so it sets the previous entity to the new one, and another tool for renaming and entity and having it automatically renamed system wide. With triple checks and a list of where it is being used.
Just saying. Avoid system wide renamings unless they can be supervised and approved by the user.
R.
I stop Node-Red when I’m switching devices and updating entities because I think in some cases it mixed a couple of devices/entities in the process.
Then I start it again and everything works fine.
this feature seems so basic and useful, it should have been there for years !! 
I guess it is not trivial to add, that would be a good explanation 
I wish it can be added somedays, I keep my finger crossed 
1 Like
there’s already tons of tools that allow you to do this. That’s the most likely reason why it’s not a high priority. Download the VSCode addon, do a find in files, and update your entity_id in 1 shot.
Hi,
I tried to go this road in the past, but since I’m a happy docker user, I can’t do it
For a time, I was thinking to add another docker VSCode container, but it was not as easy as installing the addon, and I gave up.
Maybe I shouldn’t have I’ll try to find a good tutorial.
Unless you know another way ?
Then you can just use VSCode normally. Or notepad++. Or any other text editing software that can search for a string inside files.
1 Like
should I shutdown HA before editing all the files ?
Nope, make sure to exclude hidden files (.storage folder). Make a backup if you are unsure of things. And go 1 by 1 w/ each replacement. I.e. click next, look at the change, click replace if it’s valid, etc.
1 Like
many thanks. I’ll give it a try, but it means I cannot do it from the GUI (locally or remotely) and I need to map the folder to another machine in order to do the search and replace.
Not as convenient as something that could happen automatically in the background by HA but I understand it has not been a priority