org.astarte-platform.InterfaceName is not a valid interface name

[bettio]

Interface name validation should allow names such as org.astarte-platform.InterfaceName.

[rbino]

Expanding on this a little bit.
Right now we're allowing only alphanumeric characters and . in the interface name.
To be precise, we're matching the interface name against this regex:

~r/^[a-zA-Z]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*$/

Since CQL only accepts alpha-numeric characters and underscores in table names, and since sometimes the interface name has to be mapped onto a table name, we deal with it here mainly by lowercasing everything and replacing . with _ (plus a bunch of extra stuff that is not relevant here).

The point is, if we allow using also - in the interface name, we mainly have two choices when we have to map the interface name to a table: either we replace also - with . or we drop it alltogether.

The first will cause conflicts between, e.g., com.my.pretty.Interface and com.my-pretty.Interface, the second will cause will cause conflicts between, e.g., com.my.PrettyInterface and com.my.Pretty-Interface.

Whichever way we decide to go, this has to be documented.

[matt-mazzucato]

These are the examples we used to validate the regular expression for interface_name

OK:
JustInterfaceName1
JustInterfaceName
justinterfacename
com.astarte-platform.InterfaceName1
com.astarte-platform.InterfaceName
com.astarte-platform.interfacename
a.InterfaceName
com.a.InterfaceName
com.0.aa
aaa.a-.aaaaa
c0m.InterfaceName

Shouldn't be ok, but we are accepting it anyway:
com.a-.interfacename

Not ok:
com.-.InterfaceName
c-m.InterfaceName
a-.a
c-o-m.astarte-platform.interfacename
1JustInterfaceName
just-interface-name
com.astarte-platform.InterfaceName-
com.astarte-platform.InterfaceName.
-a.a
0.test.InterfaceName
0.InterfaceName
-
.
-.