Cloud device name sanitation

Cloud
1

When I change the name of a device through my app or the Particle CLI, it always accepts the name change, but will internally drop unsupported characters and change spaces to underscores. Is there any documentation on how the cloud will decide to remove/change the input?

Also, is there a name length limit, and if not, should there be? I did see this discussion but was just able to enter the entire Bee Movie script (50 KB) into the device name and save it so I was wondering if maybe the cloud wanted to check that too. Though in the mean time, I'm going to limit my users to 35 characters lol.

2

What if your users saved the name only on your DB/backend, and left the particle name untouched?

3

I could certainly do something different. For quick reference it's nice to see names in the pretty console instead of having to go take a look at our backend. I know naming has always been cast aside in favor of "just use your Device ID" but I still thought I'd ask.

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4

That's actually kind of funny.

The name sanitization is:

  • Leading and trailing space and tabs removed
  • Spaces replaced by underscores
  • Non-ASCII letters and numbers removed except for @.+_-
		return str.trim()
			.replace(/[ ]+/g, '_')
			.replace(/[^@.+a-zA-Z0-9_-]/g, '');

The length probably should be sanitized but is not. The back-end is MongoDB, not SQL, so it doesn't have fixed maximum length like VARCHAR in SQL.

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5

The length will be limited to 128 characters in the future. There are currently no devices with a name longer than that, so it won't affect any existing names.

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