Benefits of template entities Select and Number

Configuration
1

Hi all,

currently it’s not yet obvious to me what deeper benefit the new template entities are supposed to have.

For example, select seems only suitable for lights and only for those ones that attributes have several options. Mmh …nice, and now?
Tried with input_select that would much more useful for me because I would be able to skip various automations, but no luck.

I would be very happy to receive better explanation or some practical examples.

2

I just try again :slightly_smiling_face:

3

I admit I have yet to find an application for them in my home. For the moment I am simply experimenting (looking for a use-case).

There’s a bug that will be fixed in 2021.09.5.

Aside from the bug, look at the example in that post. It makes a select from a media_player’s picture_mode attribute.

So far, I know you can make a select from two sources:

  1. A hard-coded list within the select itself.
  2. Any entity’s attribute containing a list.

What I was looking for was to be able to dynamically define the select’s options (add/remove members from the list) and have it survive a restart (even an input_select resets itself on startup). I don’t believe that’s possible with a Template Select so I investigated an MQTT Select.

It doesn’t work there either because its options only accepts a hard-coded list. It would need to (optionally) support sourcing from an MQTT topic. Then I could publish whatever list I want to the topic (as a retained message) and thereby dynamically change the select’s list of options. Because it’s published as a retained message, the list would survive a restart.

4

Thank you so much for your constructive reply. Now I was at least able to creat several select entities. All in all, however, it does not have the advantages I was hoping for (something similar kind of dynamic selection). I have 2 input_selects and various automations for defining and preselecting Hue scenes depending on the selected Hue group coupled with input_number sliders that interact with the selected item. Maybe it’s to extensive for a select entity.
Would have been glad to give you some tiny input back, but I have no clue about MQTT :frowning: