Naming rules and limits

Names in Sift are often used as identifiers in the API and workflow pipelines, not just as display labels. Understanding the constraints for each entity type helps you avoid failures and plan for changes.

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General behaviors

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Case sensitivity

Asset names are stored with their original casing. Sift maintains a lowercase index to support case-insensitive lookups, and the filtering API supports both caseSensitive: true and caseSensitive: false modes.

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Name reuse after archiving

For most entities, uniqueness constraints apply only to non-archived entities. Once an entity is archived, its name can be reused by a new entity. Channel names are scoped per Asset, meaning two different Assets can have a Channel with the same name. Within a single Asset, a Channel is uniquely identified by the combination of name, data type, and unit. A Channel with the same name but a different data type or unit is treated as a distinct Channel.

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Whitespace trimming

Asset and Tag names have leading and trailing whitespace trimmed before storage.

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Assets

asset_name is a required field in the ingestion API, data import API, and Channel schema API. If you create an Asset under one name, every external system sending data to that Asset by name must use that exact name.

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Channels

Channel names function as identifiers in the ingestion pipeline. Like Asset names, changing a Channel name is not supported. Any external system referencing the Channel by name would require updates.

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Channel name structure

Explore uses the Channel Name Delimiter setting to parse channel names into a visual hierarchy in the channel tree. Three settings control this behavior:

• Delimiter: the primary character that splits a channel name into hierarchy levels. For example, . splits engine.temperature.value into engine > temperature > value.
• Prefix Delimiter: optional. Applied before the main delimiter to strip path-style prefixes such as PRIM/engine.temperature or /gsw/egse/engine.temperature.
• Leaf Keywords: trailing segments treated as placeholders rather than hierarchy levels. For example, if value is a leaf keyword, engine.temperature.value displays as engine > temperature.

Configure these settings in Explore settings.

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Calculated Channels

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Runs

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Annotations

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Campaigns

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Tags

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Flows