Dashboard Names Obfuscated in URLs in Kibana 5

[seth.yes (Seth S)]

Prior to Kibana v5, I could save a dashboard as something like:
myTestDashboard

I could then navigate to a url, knowing I'd find my dashboard there; e.g:
http://myKibanaServer/#/myTestDashboard

and it would resolve to the dashboard I'd just created. However in the new Kibana, this doesn't appear to be the case. Now the URL I must navigate to is something like:
http://myKibanaServer/app/kibana#/dashboard/69fc2fe0-2517-11e7-8b20-43aafd551eef

This becomes especially problematic when I'm trying to create navigation visualizations with the markdown widget -- I have hundreds of broken links because these new dashboards are being saved in a manner inconsistent with previous versions of Kibana.

####Is there any way to get a dashboard which I save as
myTestDashboard
####to resolve to a dashboard that I can systematically anticipate? e.g.
http://myKibanaServer/app/kibana#/dashboard/myTestDashboard

[cjcenizal]

Hi Seth,

Out of curiosity, how are you generating broken links -- are you programmatically generating your navigation markdown widgets somehow?

Here's the original PR which introduced this change, to give some context: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/pull/9087. The string in the URL is and always has been the dashboard ID, except we originally repurposed the dashboard's name as the ID. This created problems when we added functionality for renaming the dashboard.

I've created an issue to add support for specifying your own ID, which should solve your problem once we add a fix. Please feel free to follow the issue at https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/11338, and chime in if you have any thoughts. And of course, PRs are welcome!

Thanks,
CJ

[seth.yes (Seth S)]

Hi CJ, thanks for opening the issue. We'll see if it gets any traction.

The way I was generating links pre-kibana5, I knew what dashboards I'd made and what differed within the URL (typically server names, allowing a drill-down from cluster to node and back). That way when creating navigation links, I could simply automate the creation of these links, and even create new links when new nodes started reporting Beats data.

Since the change I've got to find the ID of every new dashboard, and place that into the markdown link. I've no idea how to automate this process with the newly implemented IDs, nor if it's feasible.