[FEATURE-REQUEST] Rename devices

[IvoGruber]

Their should be a way to rename devices in the device-list. This helps to avoid renaming things later in the matter controller. If you loose the connection or have to reconnect for some reason.

[Luligu]

That is a possibility to consider. I never tried that cause nodeLabel is writable from the controller...

In the home assistant plugin I added a postfix for both serial and nodeLabel... apparently no issues there.

But shelly plugin is much much more complex.

That could be like you activate the name postfix to add like 'SH' and then in the controller you change only the entity?

Is this what you have in mind ?

[IvoGruber]

That would be even better, if the controller can also change the name and it would be seen in matterbridge as well?! Do not see that behavior with Alexa. I rename all the devices there (by appending " Bridge").

So I thought just before you expose it to matter one should be able to give it still a different name, so the controller deals with different name initially. This way I do not need to add " Bridge" anymore in Alexa. I once asked for the postfix in the shelly-plugin but I am now locking more into matterbridge itself and if features could be placed there in a better way and thus all plugins could benefit from it.

And renaming the device would even be better than just adding a general postfix.

If there is a way to give entities of a device also its own name (even without decomposing the device as mentioned in the other #208), that probably would also help with Alexa (even though chances are high it won't).

I'm not sure about the internal architecture of matterbridge, but I expect to have an intermediate layer of devices created by the plugins. In that layer things could still be renamed, decomposed, or even rearanged (composed to new devices), before handing it over and expose it to matter. Possibly that layer does not exist yet but would be worth to think about it?!

[Apollon77]

nodeLabel is set by controllers kind of automatically and likely uses the name of the "home" ... so no real way. Also device names are kind of managed by controller as soon as pairing happened, so changing locally does not have any real effect. soooo ....

[IvoGruber]

@Apollon77 thanks for clarification. So changing the name after commsioning is not very useful?! But might prior?! Since devices will be added even after comissioning its might an idea to have an option to hold them back first and only expose them after a user has made changes and explicitly set a flag to expose them!

Just to point that out again: The use case is to have a working configuration prior (re)commisioning and avoid (re)configuration on the controller later.