Direct URL to entity details user interface

Hey community,

Is there a way to get a direct URL to access the details of an entity?

Example

The URL https://my-homeassistant-instance.com/lovelace/entity/sensor.room_temperature

Would open this or a similar view:

Rationale

This would be useful for all kinds of notifications, markdown content, alerting, etc.
If not possible atm I would go as far and raise a feature request on GitHub.

Do you know of anything? Cheers

If you use the companion app for notifications and if you have an android phone then you can do this. See here for how.

Thereā€™s no generic link though. As you can see in the documentation I linked its not even a real URL, its basically a special command the android app understands.

I think thereā€™s also a way to make a link to show the more info of an entity in a markdown card that I vaguely recall seeing before but I canā€™t remember how to do it. If you searched this forum I bet its on here somewhere.

Feature requests belong here, not on github. Thatā€™s how this project is managed.

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Thanks,
I recall the android action, yes sadly it doesnā€™t help here. Iā€™ve just searched for anything related to markdown, however couldnā€™t find anything either. Iā€™ve investigated the different areas of the Home Assistant UI (lovelace, developer tools > states, settings), there doesnā€™t seem to be a preexisting option (at least it is not used as far as I can see).

What about the rest API

REST APIs return JSON. Not really the same thing.

Fwiw @ThomDietrich I canā€™t find the markdown thing either. Maybe I just imagined it. Sorry about that.

http://homeassistant:8123/history?entity_id=sensor.your_sensor&start_date=2022-09-19T14:00:00.000Z

You can get the link by right clicking on the show more(mehr anzeigen in the image in post before mine)

It can be logbook instead of history

its a shame you canā€™t use the ā€œmā€ shortcut though

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Indeed! That is a good discovery.
Sadly still doesnā€™t solve my use case as I want to be able to control and manage the entity after following the linkā€¦

Hmm you could potentially go straight to the devices pageā€¦ Itā€™s just a url.

The popup window is different because itā€™s a popupā€¦

http://homeassstant:8123/config/devices/device/deviceIDorsoemthign

Although at that point you could also go to a lovelace viewā€¦

Good idea, sadly I have an entity_id, not a device :-/

I think there are ways to programmatically identify the device an entity belongs. That would be a solution for meā€¦ if every entity indeed belonged to a device, which isnā€™t the case :speak_no_evil:

Thanks for all your suggestions! Feels like this is indeed not solved yet. If you believe it shouldn please Vote on this feature request :slight_smile:

hmm not sure I see the use-case honestly.

If it doesnā€™t have a deviceā€¦ make it a device?
It looks like a mqtt sensor, just make it auto discovery one, you will be able to link to the device page.

Or just set up what you want to see on a lovelace view and look at that

alert rpi is hot
goto
rpi-lovelace (view graphā€¦Turn on server room fan)

you could even start hereā€¦
Capture

editā€¦ you are basically requesting a deep link to developer state pageā€¦ seems counter productive when you could actually make a nice lovelace view with all the info from different entities you want.

This went a bit off-topic. Yes your workaround would be a solution if all entities had a device and hopefully, eventually, the Home Assistant world will have matured that far. However clearly this shouldnā€™t block short-term quick wins. Letā€™s put your devices idea to the side for a second.

Even if there was an over-engineered workaround (devices, custom lovelace ui, some custom component, ā€¦), thatā€™s hardly an adequate solution. The original request was for a ā€œDirect URL to entity detailsā€. I can think of numerous use cases why something as simple as that makes sense. I will intentionally only list one (not mine, but probably the one everyone can relate to):

ā€œHey Admin, I had to realize that this switch doesnā€™t work anymore. Could you have a look? Thanksā€

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I am the adminā€¦ in this case, as I look after the entities and home assistant.

I wouldnā€™t want to link this externally to say github, I would link to whatever the entity relates to eg. mosquitto or an addon.

on the other handā€¦ my wife wouldnā€™t link it to me either. She would say the tv isnā€™t working you broke it again.

in fact she has limited access to this area as I wouldnā€™t want her to rename things etc.

She has her own lovelace page with stuff she uses.

Iā€™m pretty sure theyā€™re envisioning HA sending you (the admin) a notification with that link. Like if say a switch became unavailable for 5 minutes HA would send the admin of the system a notification like this

ā€œHey Admin, I had to realize that this switch doesnā€™t work anymore. Could you have a look? Thanksā€

With a link that takes you to the more info view of the entity. To see when it broke and possibly fix it.

Or at least follow other links to fix it in the related tab. Not much fixing can be done from the more info popup unless the problem is that the name or icon changed randomly.

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Yeah i did get that impressionā€¦
It is sort of an compelling argumentā€¦

Except

  • It only applies to manual entities as the others can in theory do thisā€¦

  • if they are manual entitiesā€¦ Send me the yaml lol, assuming I was remote and not getting yelled at.

  • it would be from an admin account to admin account. Non admins donā€™t have access to developers/states. I actually have to check that, it has been ages since I logged into my wifeā€™s account.

  • non admins are going to see the entity in lovelave to even notice it is brokenā€¦ They could link the lovelace urlā€¦ Or yell at me.

  • non admins like my kids shouldnā€™t be near stuff they can break.

  • any other reasons seem like they could be automated anyway

  • I certainly wouldnā€™t link an entity externally, even if someone else could log in.

I totally vote for this feature.
This could be implemented as an extension of the default action framework.

Basically to add an entry so that, when ā€œmore-infoā€ or ā€œtoggleā€, an attribute with the target entity for such actions can be defined.
By adding that, then thereā€™s multiple ways to use that across Home Assistant, supporting hopefully OP use case and many more like post 84631 or 160476
Thanks!

These can already be done without this feature request. The posts have the answers in them.

84631 how-to-create-a-button-linking-to-another-ha-tab-or-view

160476 open-more-info-of-an-other-entity-climate-at-tap-on-a-glace-temp-sensor

Fair enough for the 84631 is slightly out of topic, but 160476 is a HACS solution, and is not a complete one as it only works on browser that have been ā€œregisteredā€, which is a browsermod only thingy.
The idea here would be to be able to develop a more-info home assistant standard action that instead of the parent entity opens another entity more-info popup. With the ā€˜proposalā€™ in the other thread the answers need to go device per device enabling the solution which creates a dependency on its implementation and is not scalable. Imagine all hass solutions required you to rework them for every single device accessing the lovelace dashboards!
So still thinking that should be solved through new feature only.

Just an FYI, this request is about being able to send someone a URL that when followed opens HA with a more-info pop-up of a particular entity in focus.

So Iā€™m not entirely sure how actions in a card in a dashboard are related. You can certainly put a button in an HA dashboard that opens more-info or a particular dashboard/panel, thatā€™s not what this is about.

This is about HA sending you a text message or something with a link. Receiving that link on some random non-HA channel and following it to a more-info pop-up.

Right. So like see here a link wouldā€™ve been really handy. Like the whole URL instead of just the random number at the endā€¦

EDIT: Iā€™m realizing this may have been you making a point. Like this is what we have to do today (text an entity ID to copy and paste) instead of sending a nice link. If so, props.

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What advantage does the url achieve here though(if it doesnā€™t exist). I could already link to something in my tap action. I may have to make it and it wouldnā€™t be scalable sure. I also donā€™t need someone to send me a link.
They can send the friendly name or entity_id and I can find what I need for debugging.

If it is for the intent of sending debug information to an external Adminā€¦ then to who and how much are they charging to supply a support and helpdesk feature?

The feature request could be ā€¦ make custom-card an inbuilt-card. Pretty sure that has been covered.
It also goes back to my point of most of this request can already be done in lovelace.

image

type: custom:button-card
entity: switch.garage_reed
icon: mdi:garage
lock:
  enabled: true
  unlock: tap
show_state: true
state:
  - color: rgb(255, 0, 0)
    icon: mdi:garage-open
    name: Garage Open
    styles:
      card:
        - animation: blink 2s linear infinite
    value: 'on'
  - color: rgb(0, 205, 0)
    icon: mdi:garage
    name: Garage Closed
    value: 'off'
  - color: rgb(255, 0, 0)
    icon: mdi:garage-alert
    name: Garage Offline
    spin: true
    value: unavailable
tap_action:
  action: call-service
  service: switch.turn_on
  service_data:
    entity_id: switch.garage_door

@CentralCommand I was trying to avoid your edit of the link tooā€¦
Although enough info was actually given for me to quickly find it tooā€¦

Here is something that helped me Introduction | Home Assistant Companion Docs

The companion app on Android supports entityId:... URLs which do exactly what this topic is about - opens the specific entity more-info dialog in the app. Unfortunately itā€™s not a fully qualified URL like some people here are asking for but Iā€™m sure itā€™s going to be good enough for some of you.