Advice on reading data to use for creating entities / sensors ( goal: Netflix categroie codes)

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I want to create entities in Home Assistant that have: a name, a text-value and are part of a group. But I do not know what is the best way and I am looking for advice and tips.

So I want to have Home Assistant read records from a file (csv, spreadsheet, json or database) and have Home Assistant create entities from the data and assign a group to the entities.

  • Should I create sensors with the REST integration in a yaml reading a JSON file? Is a integration available that is able to do the same with an CSV file or a spreadsheet table?
  • Should I create input.selector helpers (in a yaml file)? Can I add a helper to a group in a yaml file?
  • Is there an easy database solution? Are there integrations that create entities from a database? I do not want to “program” a lot myself.

My end-goal is to create front-end cards with auto entities per group. Each group is a main Netflix content category (like “action”, “documentaries”) that shows the sub-categories (“action comedies” , “foreign documentaries”). The entity card will open an URL that shows all the content of the particular (sub-)categorie.

I could make a fixed html page my-self with the URL’s to the Netflix category pages, but I do not want to as it is a one fix solution that does not allow me to reuse the raw data.

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I think I would use NodeRed to extract the data and put it in to sensor entities named for each category with state for last update and attributes for each entry, maybe as a list or dict.
It should be pretty easy to make a jinja code ina card to extract and show that list, dict or whatever method you use to store the information in the attributes of the sensor.

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