Building Block instance name should be useable as a variable
in progress
Y
Young-Hwan Kim
As a service owner I want to have a nice UX and enforce a manageable overview for my customers.
At the moment the Building Block instance name is:
- at the very bottom of the form -> should be the first field
- cannot be used as an actual input -> therefore I require my users to input a name for the service instance twice (once as a input and once as a instance name for meshStack only)
- I cannot update the description of the Building Block Instance name
Please expose the Instance Name as potential input for the actual building block provisioning
J
Johannes Rudolph
marked this post as
in progress
Update: Building Block Naming Experiment in v2026.17.0
We shipped a first experiment to solving this problem in meshStack v2026.17.0. Please be aware that this functionality will likely change substantially in our next iteration and we do not consider this production ready yet. Nonetheless we want to give you the opportunity already to provide us early feedback:
Editable name at the top of the ordering form
The building block name is now displayed as a prominent, editable title at the very top of the ordering form (not buried at the bottom). Click the pen icon to edit it inline before confirming the order.
→ Details
Template-based building block names
Platform engineers can now set the building block definition name to a template using mustache-style placeholders, e.g.
GitHub Repo {{ repoName }}
. When a user fills in repoName
, the building block name is set automatically — no need to type the name twice. Duplicate names are handled with auto-appended suffixes like (1)
.→ Details. As stated, this is an experiment to get feedback on using the mustache synax approach for generating display names from inputs, we aware that there are shortcomings currently how those definition names are rendered including these raw template definitions on the marketplace catalog.
The ability to pass the instance name as a variable into the actual provisioning module is still on our radar but we think modelling it the other way around (generating display names from inputs) is more natural for common Building Block use cases like DNS Records etc.
Please let us know though what you think about this.
J
Johannes Rudolph
Update: Auto-generated default names for building blocks
We keep hearing the same story: you provision a building block, forget to rename it,
and hit a "duplicate name" error on the next one. Totally understandable — it's an
easy trap, especially when you're provisioning multiple instances of the same building
block type.
We wanted to share a related piece of feedback we received:
> "I've been hitting the same error repeatedly where I forget to rename a building
> block during provisioning. Could we look into generating a random default name?
> It would prevent those 'duplicate name' errors and make the whole process more
> fail-proof for the user."
If you have thoughts on what a good default name pattern would look like
(e.g., random adjective-noun, timestamp suffix, derived from an input),
we'd love to hear it — drop a comment below!
Jelle den Burger
We understand the frustration here.
We hope in future that we can resolve this problem by provindg the name or possibly getting rid of the requirement of a name in general so that you can create your own "name" variable.
We'll keep you updated on any progress on this topic.