Adding comments tags to automations, scripts, scene etc

Feature Requests
1

I imagine a comment tag in the yaml so that we could add comments with more specifics about what an automation/script/scene does. Also to an entity, where is it located specifically, what component it is etc. Basically just free text. This could be displayed when you hover that entry, or show up in the popup box when you click it. Bonus if you can edit the comments from the frontend gui. Example of what i’m thinking.

- id: light_bath_dim
  alias: 'Dim down bathroom lights'
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: sensor.fibaro_fgms001zw5_burglar
    to: '0'
    for:
      minutes: 10
  condition:
    condition: state
    entity_id: light.qubino_zmnhdd1_level
    state: 'on'
  action:
    - service: light.turn_on
      data:
        entity_id: light.qubino_zmnhdd1_level
        brightness: 40
    - service: light.turn_off
      entity_id: light.sonoff_basic_3
  comment:
    - title: 'Dim down bathroom lights'
    - content: 'This automation will dim down the downlights 10 minutes after the motion sensors last motion detection on the condition that the light are still on. The condition is to avoid that the lights will be turned on if they were turned off manually. It will also turn off the mirror lights immediately.'

I personally think this is a nice touch that can make it more user friendly for the end users. How nerdy and detailed the content is, is obviously up to the person making that comment.

2

Sorry to necropost, but I desperately need something like this, and I’m disappointed to see how little discussion there has been of anything like it, or of adding custom attributes, or ANYTHING that would allow me to add further information that hasn’t been strictly predetermined by the HA develoment team. I want to be able to categorize or classify scenes by mood, style, time of day they’re intended for, etc, so that auto-entities can read the fields break them into cards, display or hide them depending on context or sensors, etc. It’d me nice to have some sort of flexible, customizable field (besides name, etc) somewhere in the schema that allowed me to define my own uses like that.

1 Like
3

Perhaps you are referring to the lack of recent discussions. It was discussed in the past and the result was the addition of the description field to automations. Beyond that, the development team has revealed no plans for a grander scheme.

There’s no discussion about that one because it already exists for entities. You can easily define custom attributes for an entity (and reference it within a template).

4

Thanks for the reply. Pardon my newbieness, but to my extremely limited-as-yet understanding, those don’t appear to solve the problem I’m talking about.

I hadn’t run across that description field for automations in the couple of times I’ve sat down to try to find an answer to this, as I’m not using automations at all, so I guess it never came up in my searches. This may be due to my unfamiliarity with the system — I assumed scenes were the way to go to store and recall configurations of lights & their settings.

As to the custom attributes, I’ve read that page before. I think the problem is I haven’t expressed myself clearly here.

What I’d like to do is extend the schema so I when I define a new scene, I can include a new mood or time_of_day attribute and in fill it in, right there in the scene definition (or, yes, even just a freeform comment or description text-entry attribute would probably work too.) I understand that I can go to a separate section of my config, create a second entry for each specific scene (or an entire domain, or by glob, or whatever) I want to add an attribute to, and explicitly define those attributes’ names and values there, but I really hoped to avoid that, for reasons I’ll explain.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a professional database developer for almost 25 years — information architecture and data entry UX design is what I do all day. So I’m more pedantic than many about avoiding redundant data entry (such having to manually type in a primary key field, e.g. a scene name, in more than one place, and then subsequently manually keep any changes in sync forever) because I spend my workdays resolving the data entry messes created by those kinds of design decisions on the part of legacy system developers. Seriously, data normalization should be taught in our high schools, our entire economy would benefit. </soapbox>

If right now the only option is to do it with redundant separate scene entries in two different places, then so be it, that’s the only way to do it, and I’m totally grateful for everything the devs have built no matter what. But, I wanted to speak up and contribute a viewpoint in support of what I think would be better design. Perhaps someday someone will see my comments and say, “You know, that guy was right.” If I continue to get deeper into HA (and can find the time!) perhaps I’ll find a way to code the change myself someday.

Like I said, I’m a newb to HA, so if I’m misunderstanding something, please don’t hesitate to correct me — apologies and thanks in advance.

3 Likes
5

Perhaps you are referring to the lack of recent discussions. It was discussed in the past and the result was the addition of the description field to automations. Beyond that, the development team has revealed no plans for a grander scheme.

I just tried this, adding description: test to an automation. It seems to only be visible in the automation editor, not as an attribute nor in the automation dialogue. Is that it?

6

I am not sure if i am misunderstanding the request, but you can put comment tags in the automation.yaml files:

- alias: Home Power On/Off
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: sensor.home_power
  condition:
    condition: template
    value_template: >
      {{ trigger.from_state.state != 'unknown' }}
  action:
# For debugging purposes only
#  - service: system_log.write
#    data_template:
#      message: "The state of the switch is {{trigger.from_state.state}}'den şuna geçti:{{trigger.to_state.state}}"
#      level: warning
  - service: notify.pushover
    data_template:
      message: >
        {% if is_state('sensor.home_power','True') %}
        Elektrikler Geldi...
        {% else %}
        Elektrikler Kesildi!!!
        {% endif %}

You can use # for comment line. The only downside is; if you use automation editor with this, it deletes all comments. That’s why i am using a text editor on automation.yaml files only.

7

That’s what I do and have configured it so my automations are stored separately from the ones created by the Automation Editor (to prevent it from purging my comments). However, comments don’t provide the functionality desired by hulkhaugen:

This could be displayed when you hover that entry, or show up in the popup box when you click it. Bonus if you can edit the comments from the frontend gui.

1 Like
8

I would like to have comment field to in both automations and scripts.
Comments with # can’t be used in UI.
Dedicated field for this would be best solution.
We can call it comment or description, and in UI editor it should be displayed at the begining of the automation / script.

1 Like
10

It’s not pretty, but I’ve solved this by creating a “helper” text input text field called “comments”.

When I want to have a comment, I just call the service input_text.set_value and put whatever I want my comment to be.

2 Likes
11

GF, I have been struggling with this for a while! Some people believe REM statements are a sign of bad programming. (Young people say, "Comments are for bad ‘coders’ but I like to comment my code. When I put comments directly into the yaml code, they work, but the next time I use the UI for any code, all my comments are removed. Could you please explain how you ‘call the service’ to put comments into automations.yaml?

TIA

12

I couldn’t agree more. I’m almost embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve spent several days hammering out an automation, only to come back some time later to make a change and not being able to figure out what I was thinking when setting it up. Adding a comment here and there to remind my future self what I was thinking would go a long way. In my mind, I imagine it being much like the (relatively) new trigger IDs. To add one, you click the trigger menu drop down and select “Edit trigger ID”, except these would be with actions instead of triggers, and instead of adding trigger IDs you’d be adding comments.

3 Likes
13

We don’t need none of this tweaks, I discovered that we can write comments/free texts in the description field. In the 3 dots menu when editing an automation, open the 3 dots menu, click “rename”, and it’s possible to edit the automation name and also a long description.

1 Like
14

Both Labels, Tag’s & Folders
I would like it, If an object or entity (script/Automation) had A label/tag option, that excepts “/“ that represent sub tags or Folders in the GUI & “,” as separate Tags. E.g.

  1. Tag: “Lights” shows in the GUI in the Folder “Lights”.
  2. Tag: “Light/Effects” would show in the GUI in the Folder “Effects”, nestled under the Folder “Light”.
  3. Tag: “Lights, Effects” would show in the GUI in both folders “Effects”, & the Folder “Lights”.
  4. Tag: “Light/Effects, Light” would show in the GUI in both folders “Light”, & the Folder “Effects”, nestled under the Folder “Light”.
  5. Tag: ““is empty”” or “root” would show up under the root folder in the GUI.
alias: A Light Script
tags: light, light/effects
sequence:
  - service: light.turn_on
    data: {}
    target:
      area_id: office
mode: single

And the “Tag” option can be reference via HAss Jinja2 extension’s

state_attr ( script.a_light_script, 'tags')

When moving entities in the GUI to a different folder, the GUI gives the options “Change” &or “Both”.
Reference# Labels, Tags & Folders for Automation Scripts

15

I would really like a simple solution to this.
I’m new here but I’ve managed to write some fairly complex automations to control my smart radiator valves.
I would very much like to be able to add comments to the yaml because:
I’m in the UK and we’re coming to the end of winter.
In six months time I expect to come back to these heating automations and I’d really like to have comments to remind me how they work :wink:

16 
Young people [may] say, "Comments are for bad ‘coders’

But young people lack the wisdom to see their value.

I’ve been a programmer for over 50 years (yes, I started out as a “young person”:slight_smile: ) and I’ve learned to both treasure and insist on comments/remarks/descriptions in code. Not useless comments that describe what is being done - that should be self-evident from the code. Such comments just add noise. I mean comments that explain reasons and significant context that is not otherwise evident.

There’s a reason that all good development standards require comments (and often in a structured form). That’s because the code shows what is done (or is to be done) but it can’t explain with any clarity why it is done like that. Obviously, in large systems there is a heap of design & architecture documentation, but that is big picture stuff (and often can become detached from the source code when it’s distributed). Down at the detailed code level, the programmer needs to pass on to their successors the reason a particular approach is used and the constraints that that approach addresses (often outside the immediate context of the code in question).

In the context of HA Automations, I find it necessary to document not just the purpose of the automation – that can be done in a description – but also, for example, the reason a particular condition is there or the secondary event that a particular action may trigger.

It is indeed unfortunate that the migration to a “visual” interface in HA has downgraded the YAML to the extent that it has. It was particularly unfortunate that it was decided to “blow away” any comments in the YAML code on migration to the visual form without even so much as a warning (at event time, not in the release notes) that that would take place.

It seems that each generation of technologists has to re-learn the hard-learned lessons from the previous generation.

Brian

4 Likes
17

Pity that Scripts don’t have an UI for descriptions the same as Automations (thanks, Claudio!)

Nonetheless, the yaml for Scripts accepts the description field and doesn’t remove it.
Likewise:

alias: Random Lights
mode: single
description: >-
  See
  https://www.example.com/reference
sequence:
3 Likes
18

For reference, a similar FR which had been active for a while was closed, with a link to this FR as a duplicate. Fair enough, but I wanted to include the link here since that thread had been going for a while and may contain posts some readers here may find interesting.

19

Most of this and that other FR is implemented, just not in how you’d expect. There’s a description field as rudolff pointed out. Also, all actions, conditions, and triggers allow alias which is used to describe that “step” for the frontend. Variables allow jinja comments ({# ... #}) as well.

3 Likes
20

Good point, there are workarounds. This FR is still a good idea, but I suspect it would be hard to implement.

My own workaround (post #2 of the other thread) is not to use the UI for automations, except maybe just to try out something new.

21

When developing automation that are related, or automation that relies on the execution of other automation or other external things (like nodered), it can be a mess to maintenance all of those things after some time or after feature changes.
A new comment textbox to be inserted in the automation, or a textbox added in existing automation’s blocks, could be useful to describe the why’s to the future yourself, looking at same automation/script in the future, of why you’ve done the things in that way.

A text string of some hundreds of characters I hope could be enough.

ps
I’m an HA user since 0.101 , so I have used also nodered to accomplish my ideas and now I’ve no time to migrate everything to HA.

Thank you!