Need to allow dashes in entity names

Question

For sequence diagrams and others it would be very helpful if the entity names could contain dashes.  In many systems UUIDs are used for the entities and their text formatting includes dashes.  Using a boundary "0a32611c-624c-4a84-9e2d-348aa95f9726" as MONIKER doesn't work very well in autogenerated diagrams because it is difficult to track or lookup the moniker.  Being able to use the raw UUID text value would be a big help in generating useful diagrams.

Comments

I also would like dashes for http stuff.  I would be ok with spaces between dashes to indicate relations.

Answer 1

Allowing dashes in IDs could be possible, but I am wondering if this would not cause some issues, because dashes are already used in relations (arrows).
For example, today, this simple example is working:

@startuml
a-b
@enduml

Because the dash is taken as a relation between a and b.

So I understand the advantage the use raw UUID for generating diagram, so we may consider this change, even if it would have some impact on existing diagrams (like my simple example).

Another option for you could be to replace dashes by underscore, ie using 0a32611c_624c_4a84_9e2d_348aa95f9726 instead of 0a32611c-624c-4a84-9e2d-348aa95f9726.

Since you are already doing text processing, this should not be a big deal.
What do you thing about it ?

 

Comments

Thanks, I didn't realize of the a-b conflict either as I typically put in spaces.  A transformation with underscores is what I'm doing now as a workaround.

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quotes work.  For example: foo-bar won't work but "foo-bar" will.

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Quotes do not always work.

Please support quotes for "port" names in component diagrams!

port firstportname

port "name-with-dash"             ; this works

"name-with-dash" --> firstportname    ; this does not work. Why?

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> this does not work. Why?

Sure, this is an issue.

Could you post here a short example that shows the issue, it would really help us.

Then we'll fix the issue.

Thanks again!

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Hello D., and all,

Please support quotes for "port" names in component diagrams!

For that you could use alias, as:

@startuml
interface i
node n {
  port p
  port firstportname
  port "name-with-dash" as nwd
}

i --> p
i --> firstportname
'i --> "name-with-dash"
i --> nwd
'"name-with-dash" --> firstportname
nwd --> firstportname
@enduml

Enjoy,
Regards.

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This is fixed now!