Naming conventions and limits

Character limits, allowed characters, and mutability behavior for Asset, Channel, Run, and other Sift entity names.

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.

General behaviors

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.

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.

Whitespace trimming

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

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.

Channels

Rule	Detail
Max length	255 bytes
Allowed characters	ASCII only: no Unicode
Prohibited characters	" \ ` ~ | and the ASCII Information Separator characters: File Separator, Group Separator, Record Separator, and Unit Separator
Spaces	Allowed
Mutability	Immutable: only description, units, metadata, and active status can be updated

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.

Channel name structure

Explore parses a Channel name into a visual hierarchy in the Channel tree using the Channel Name Delimiter, Channel Name Prefix Delimiter, and Channel Leaf Keywords settings. See General settings to configure these settings.

Channel names often end in a trailing word, such as value, that designates the stored reading but does not add context to the Channel tree, so with Channel Name Delimiter set to ., Channel Name Prefix Delimiter set to /, and Channel Leaf Keywords including value, the Channel name Some/Folder/actual.channel.name.value displays in the Channel tree as:

Some
  Folder
    actual
      channel
        name

Calculated Channels

Runs

Annotations

Campaigns

Tags

Flows