HA Entity ID Derived from "Friendly Name"

[this-user]

Describe the bug

When adding a new HA entity of any kind, there are options to assign a name, server, device, and type in the upper half of the menu. In the lower half, a "Friendly name", icon, entity picture, category, and device class can be set.

The assumption would be that "Friendly name" is what is being displayed as the entity name to the user when looking up the entity in HA, and that the "Name" will be used as part of the actual entity ID.

However, while the "Friendly name" does show up as the displayed name, the first "Name" setting is apparently ignored, and the entity ID is instead derived from the "Friendly name". E.g. if the name for a switch entity is set to "Manufacturer Device Type 101 Switch 3 and friendly name is set to "AV Receiver Mute", then the device ID will be "switch.av_receiver_mute" instead of "switch.manufacturer_device_type_101_switch_3" as intended.

The result of this is, when you are setting up a lot of entities in Node-RED while trying to name them systematically, that you have to use overly long and complex friendly names as the other setting is simply being ignored.

To Reproduce

1. Open Node-RED GUI in HA
2. Create a new flow
3. Add any kind of entity
4. Configure the entity with different name and friendly name
5. Save the entity
6. Deploy the flow
7. Look up the newly created entity in HA

Expected behavior

Friendly name would be the displayed name while "name" would be used as the internal name from which the entity ID is derived.

Screenshots

No response

Example Flow

[
    {
        "id": "6f8e893b1dde133d",
        "type": "tab",
        "label": "Flow 1",
        "disabled": false,
        "info": "",
        "env": []
    },
    {
        "id": "70cbbb1654bd79f9",
        "type": "ha-switch",
        "z": "6f8e893b1dde133d",
        "name": "My Test Switch",
        "version": 0,
        "debugenabled": false,
        "inputs": 1,
        "outputs": 2,
        "entityConfig": "ae0f5547a498cbe0",
        "enableInput": true,
        "outputOnStateChange": false,
        "outputProperties": [
            {
                "property": "outputType",
                "propertyType": "msg",
                "value": "state change",
                "valueType": "str"
            },
            {
                "property": "payload",
                "propertyType": "msg",
                "value": "",
                "valueType": "entityState"
            }
        ],
        "x": 520,
        "y": 320,
        "wires": [
            [],
            []
        ]
    },
    {
        "id": "ae0f5547a498cbe0",
        "type": "ha-entity-config",
        "server": "527e0002.9e78",
        "deviceConfig": "d2e0a04f4e8aa77a",
        "name": "Node-RED Test Device 101",
        "version": 6,
        "entityType": "switch",
        "haConfig": [
            {
                "property": "name",
                "value": "Node-RED Test Device 11011"
            },
            {
                "property": "icon",
                "value": ""
            },
            {
                "property": "entity_picture",
                "value": ""
            },
            {
                "property": "entity_category",
                "value": ""
            },
            {
                "property": "device_class",
                "value": ""
            }
        ],
        "resend": false,
        "debugEnabled": false
    },
    {
        "id": "527e0002.9e78",
        "type": "server",
        "name": "Home Assistant",
        "addon": true,
        "rejectUnauthorizedCerts": true,
        "ha_boolean": "",
        "connectionDelay": false,
        "cacheJson": false,
        "heartbeat": false,
        "heartbeatInterval": "",
        "statusSeparator": "",
        "enableGlobalContextStore": false
    },
    {
        "id": "d2e0a04f4e8aa77a",
        "type": "ha-device-config",
        "name": "Node Rest Test Device",
        "hwVersion": "",
        "manufacturer": "Node-RED",
        "model": "",
        "swVersion": ""
    }
]

Environment Information

Home Assistant OS: 15.2
Home Assistant Core 2025.6.x (happens with all of them)
Supervisor: 2025.06.2
Node-RED Addon: 19.0.2
Node-RED Companion: 4.1.2 (installed with HACS)

Additional context

No response

[zachowj]

Just to clarify a few things:

The “Name” field at the top of the node editor is only used for labeling the node in the Node-RED UI. It has no impact on the actual entity or entity ID in Home Assistant.

The “Friendly Name” field in the configuration is what Home Assistant uses to generate the entity ID — but only on the initial deploy. Node-RED passes that friendly name to Home Assistant, and HA generates the entity ID based on it, assuming the ID isn’t already taken. https://zachowj.github.io/node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket/guide/custom_integration/#tip

After that first deploy, Node-RED has no further control over the entity ID. Any changes to it must be made from within the Home Assistant UI directly.

[this-user]

Thanks for the reply.

What trips me up from a user perspective is that there are basically three "names" when adding a HA node in NR:

1. The node name that can be set in each node's configuration menu
2. The entity name in the "Properties" tab of the entity configuration node
3. The "friendly name" in the "Properties" tab of the entity configuration node

I probably didn't understand the purpose of 2. correctly, assuming it was related to setting the entity ID, as there is the additional "friendly name". But since it is not, it becomes somewhat redundant and could be set to the value of either 1. or 3. One can obviously assign one entity config to multiple entity nodes, which may be useful in some scenarios where differently configured nodes are needed that are linked to the same entity. That rules out using the value from 1., but because it has no real function anyway, I don't see a good reason why the config node could not simply use the "friendly name" or vice versa, consolidating the two fields into on, thereby making things a bit less confusing.

But what I actually wanted to achieve is set an entity ID that is separate from the friendly name, because the ID is supposed to be systematic, so entities have an ID that helps identify them, while the friendly name was supposed to be more descriptive. But after reading up a bit on this topic, it seems that this is not currently consistently supported throughout HA, and the name is usually used to generate the entity ID. Some integrations like MQTT allow the use of the object_id attribute that set the entity ID while name will then be used as the actual displayed entity name.

So, I'm not sure if this would work with the mechanism that the NR integration currently uses to register entities. If it does, then it should be possible to achieve what I have described, which would make the "name" property in the entity config node much more useful.