Distinguish between if a sensor has been changed due to automation, sensor template, or manually changed?

Configuration
1

I have a use case I am trying to figure out if it’s possible to achieve in HA or not.

Is it possible use distinguish between if a sensor has been changed due to automation, sensor template, or manually changed?
The reason I want to know this is because if it’s changed manually I want to set that the user has overridden the system. If there is an override, I want to keep the sensor in that status until next day.

Any ideas?

2

Are you talking about a sensor based on the Template Sensor integration? Because an automation can’t change a typical sensor’s state because there’s no standard service call to do it.

3

Ok, good point. I would say its a template based sensor, so yes automation will not be applicable.

4

Template Sensors compute their state based on the contents of their template (which typically references other entities). How do you propose to manually change the state value of a Template Sensor?

5

If you want to change a sensor’s state through an automation there’s a workaround.

Create an input_text and change that value through an automation

Then create a template sensor that has that input_text as its state.

6

I would hesitate to call it a workaround because that’s what Template Sensors do; they monitor other entities. Moreover, whether the input_text’s value changes via an automation or a user altering it, it’s transparent to the Template Sensor (i.e. it doesn’t know why the entity’s value changed).

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7

I do that to have switches on my dashboard to enable or disable various automations. As that caused a lot of extra coding i many places, the items that were repeated alot of places I put into a generic script which is then called by a variety of automations that are separate but hacing the sdame kind of logice required (such as handling motion sensors in different rooms which I treat largely the same way except for timouts, which I also have in the generic script and are alsop adjustable on the dashboard). To make the scripts generic, I am passing several variables to the scripts from each of the related automations. Extra work to struggle through getting it to work, but well worth it!