Don't show "Machine name" in entity listings

Tagging

If the machine names for nodes, view modes, fields, etc. aren't shown in the ui, how am I as a developer supposed to find them out? Inspect class names and guess from there, or insert a kpr() every time I want to write hook_anything? This seems like a dx regression to me.

Seeing it in the Field UI is helpful.

The Views listing has the machine name in the title text when hovering on the row.

IIRC, the concern is that the machine name clutters the ui and overloads the non-technical user with information. But we want the developer/site builder to have access to this information, preferably on overview and edit pages.

Having to hover a link and remember a string, or click through to a new page to be able to copy isn't optimal, especially if the machine name is something long and repetitive (as happens with Drupal sometimes :D ). Title attribute text isn't optimal for many users for a number of reasons either.

Like Tim mentioned, seeing the field machine names which often differ greatly from the human readable name in the UI is extremely useful if you want to quickly grok what the site's field naming scheme is, or check which fields were created and can be destroyed easily with the UI and which are provided by modules -- I and a few developers I know use the Title module naming scheme, where if a field is required and provided by a custom module we name it {name}_field instead of field_{name}. Probably not widespread practice, but another real world example.

How about all entity machine names are listed visually and selectably underneath their human readable names when a new permission is enabled, so you can scope machine names to only the roles that are likely to need them?

> How about all entity machine names are listed visually and selectably underneath their human readable names when a new permission is enabled, so you can scope machine names to only the roles that are likely to need them?

I don't understand this. What does this mean?

> …click through to a new page to be able to copy isn't optimal

Nothing is ever optimal. It's about trade-offs. I don't think we should be optimizing the discoverability of the machine name at the cost of cluttering overview pages.

tstoeckler that's a good point. I would say it's not quite 80%, since every site built by a firm/developer for an end user will own the superuser themselves and give their clients purpose built roles so they can't destroy the site, but enthusiasts and the mythical admin + nontechnical end user hybrid trying out the system themselves would be stuck with the full developer view.

We could do something similar with a module and the admin/config page instead of using permissions. That's a little more complexity on the api end.

Adding a permission comes down to pushing of the decision off somewhere else, to an out-of-context place where it will be very hard to understand what the whole concept means. The name 'machine name' already implies that this isn't user-facing material. I don't think you can lump the whole group of site-builders in as a target audience, it's only for those who write actual code as well, which is a sub-set of the site builders group.

Showing it below the name is tricky too: it would increase, almost double, the height of each row for 1, relatively unimportant piece of data, thus halving the information densitiy of the screen. Lets not do that, look at the views listing for the amount of clutter that approach can lead to :)

I understand the need to have it available somewhere in the ui, but I haven't seen a convincing argument yet to stop us from moving it away from the listing into the individual entity settings form.

Just adding a note that #1833104: Add a "translatable" column to Manage Fields is about adding a column.

I just thought of a flaw with this. In a listing you can have multiple items with the same label. There would be no way to differentiate between those items without a machine_name, right?

The attached patch simply removes the machine name column.

EntityListController can be extended by other modules to add this column in, if it's needed in special cases.

This patch also adjusts the test scripts to match.

Novice issue cleanup.

Not sure if this is still an issue or not since the list builders were split out per-entity type. It may be an issue on some.

Rerolled the patch.

I could apply the patch, so no reroll is needed. Applied against 8.2.x branch .
Removed Needs Reroll Issue tag.

I'm not sure if this is even an issue anymore. I couldn't find any core list builders (aside from in the entity_test module) that were exposing the machine name.

Think this can be closed as there has been no follow up since moving to PNMI 7 years ago.

If still a valid task please reopen updating the issue summary.

Thanks!