Hello. I am a user from South Korea who uses Home Assistant.
I always appreciate the efforts of the Home Assistant developers.
I have a suggestion for the automation UI, so I’m leaving this topic.
When writing automations, it’s common to set triggers or conditions based on states or numeric states.
However, it’s often inconvenient as I can’t know the current state and need to keep the dashboard or developer tools open while writing automations.
What if it could display the current state when you set an entity_id?
Conditional cards in the dashboard have a similar feature, and it’s very convenient.
Please take a look at the example in the attached file.
Honest question:
How would knowing the entity’s current state make “automation writing easier”?
For example, if I want a State Trigger to trigger when a door opens, I will set it to trigger on Open. The door’s current state, whether Open or Closed, is irrelevant to my decision to configure the trigger to use Open.
The types of sensors aren’t limited to just binary options. For instance, in cases like monitoring temperature and humidity, where you might want to trigger based on the current state or condition, reducing reliance on developer tools for referencing current states is possible.
This content is not limited to simple things like binary sensors and switches. It often occurs that for devices supporting more diverse states such as climate or fans, or for cases involving temperature/humidity, user need to open developer tools to know the current state.
For users familiar with Home Assistant, this part may not be of great significance. However, for beginners who are just starting out, setting up trigger points is considered the most challenging part in writing automations.
For such novice users, I believe these options would be useful.
People around me are starting to explore Home Assistant,
and in our conversations, I found that they struggled with setting up automation triggers.
After explaining the use of tools that provide current state information, such as developer tools, as mentioned in the text, they seemed to have a better understanding.
Therefore, I suggested that it would be even better if this is also expressed in automation creation tools.
Never said it would be; if you recall, I said “For example”.
You normally trigger on a desired value and the available values are displayed in, for example, a State Trigger’s to option. EDIT That was an important addition to the Automation Editor, many versions ago, because it allows the user to see the available, correct values.
If the values aren’t limited to a selection, like a numeric value, typically your intended application dictates the value. For example, if I want to send a notification when the temperature decreases below 16, a design requirement of my application, the sensor’s current temperature isn’t needed for me to configure the trigger.
The Feature Request is a ‘nice to have’ but doesn’t expedite creating a trigger.
