Do labels propagate down the area → device → entity hierarchy?

[zimpenfish (rjp)]

I might be doing something wrong or have assumed wrongly but I’d assumed that setting a label on a device would cause that device’s entities to also pick up that label. Otherwise if I want to label my temperature sensor, that’s 5 distinct trips around the UI to label the device and its 4 child entities (which is daft UX.)

(same for if I label an area, I’d expect every device in that area to pick up that label)

Is this currently not supported? Is it planned to be supported? Or is it just the case that if I want to label things, I’d best get clicking through the UI (I have 59 devices with 350 entities and the thought of having to label them all one by one is … saddening.)

[Stiltjack]

Not supported at the moment. Don’t know if it’s planned.

Labelling has turned out to be one of those features that lots of people requested, but now it’s here nobody quite knows what to do with it. Setting it up is a chore, as you say, and the filtering system is clunky. However, it’s quite a useful addition in other ways - you can target labels in automations, for example. I suspect that once it has settled in, people’s use of it will not be what anyone expected.

Your idea of propagating labels down is an interesting one. However don’t over estimate the importance of devices. Entities are the core of HA, devices are just containers for them. Some devices don’t exist as physical objects; a lot of entities don’t belong to devices. You can create “virtual” devices and add entities to existing devices. It’s best to avoid working with them if you can.

Why and how to avoid device_ids in automations and scripts

Background When you start writing automations, a device trigger seems the obvious choice. Everybody knows what a device is and it comes at the top of the UI dropdown list. [image] It works… but it is certainly not a “great way to start” because it is storing up problems for the future. Far better to use entity, with state or numeric_state. Device_id problems The yaml will be longer and harder to follow, which may make maintenance difficult, especially a few months down the line when you h…

You don’t have to use labels, of course. Many people don’t.

Apologies if you know all this already - I see you’ve only just joined the forum, but you may have been using HA for years.

[zimpenfish (rjp)]

@Stiltjack

I see you’ve only just joined the forum

This is just the first weirdness that annoyed me enough to create an account to get clarification.

@Stiltjack

Entities are the core of HA, devices are just containers for them.

Yep and I don’t do anything with device IDs.

But take my temperature sensors as an example - each device has four entities. With the sensible approach of trickle-down labels (area → device → entity), I can just label the device and get four entities labelled for free. Or label one area and get 10 devices, 50 entities labelled for free. Without this, labels are pretty useless because I’m just not going to label 350 entities (even 59 devices is pushing my tolerance for using the HA UI.)