Accessing/testing entity_category "property" in templates

[drcoolzic (Jean)]

In a template how do I find that an entity has an entity_category “property”?
How do I find it / test or filter for a category / print it?
By the way (stupid question?) what is an entity property?

see Device configuration URL and entity categories | Home Assistant Developer Docs

For example in one of my ESPHome component I have added ‘entity_category: diagnostic’ on one of my sensor and it is correctly reported as a diagnostic sensor but where is the information hidden

[pedolsky]

You can see this under Settings - Devices (or the device link of the integration):

your_homeassistant_url:8123/config/devices/dashboard

[tom_l]

@drcoolzic

In a template how do I find that an entity has an entity_category “property”?

I don’t think there is currently a way to access this through the object properties. I tried this:

states.domain.object_id.entity_category

for a couple of entities that I know have this property defined but it showed nothing:

And generated this warning:

Template variable warning: 'homeassistant.helpers.template.TemplateState object' has no attribute 'entity_category' when rendering '{{ states.sensor.lawn_moisture_battery.entity_category }} {{ states.sensor.lawn_moisture_soil_moisture.entity_category }}'

I have opened a feature request to have this added. Vote for it here: Add the entity_category to the available state object properties

@drcoolzic

By the way (stupid question?) what is an entity property?

There are very few stupid questions and this isn’t one of them. Petro has a great post on object properties here:

Last_updated State and last-changed in Lovelace

Ok, so this is where things get funky. You should familiarize yourself with home assistant state objects. This is what home assistant passes around when doing pretty much anything. These state objects contain 8 or so properties. Do not get these properties confused with the devices attributes. These properties are: Field Description state.state String representation of the current state of the entity. Example off. state.entity_id Entity ID. Format: .<object_id>. Example: light.…

[drcoolzic (Jean)]

I did try exactly the same thing on one of my devices
{{ states.sensor.weather_power_cuisine.entity_category }}
I did not get any error, but I also did not get any value back.

Thanks for the feature request, I have voted for it

I am in the process of exploring templating in detail and I have read in detail the state object page. Before reading the explanation from @petro (this guy seems to know everything about architecture and is a “god” in templating) I did not realize that field = property ! So in the documentation in some places field is used and in some other places property is used

So far I have been trying to avoid using the states.sensor.weather_power_cuisine kind of syntax as this is not recommended in the templating page but as @petro mention sometimes there is no other way around, for example for accessing last_updated field/property :
states.sensor.weather_power_cuisine.last_updated
and by using his trick
{% if states.sensor.weather_power_cuisine is defined %}
you can avoid error during startup time.

I think it would be nice to have a function like state_field('domain.object_id', 'field_name') that would return the value of the field for the specified entity.

And less important, but would be nice to have, iterators like state_fields('domain.object_id') and to be consistant state_attributes('domain.object_id') as well

Thanks again

[tom_l]

You can always open a feature request.