I recently switched from hassbian to hassio. My reluctance to switch meant that I’ve been running a somewhat older version of Home Assistant, but I decided to make the switch. I updated my HA a few times, and it settled on 7.x (I didn’t realize until later that another update was available, 8.4).
It seemed like a good time to start using UI-edited dashboards. My problems:
It refused to let me edit the main dashboard, because it was in “YAML” mode. Sadly, the error message didn’t tell me how to change that, but eventually I discovered I needed to remove “lovelace/mode: yaml” from my configuration.yaml. Success, I can use the UI to edit the main dashboard!
I want to assign dashboards to non-admin users, but this doesn’t seem to work in any intuitive way. What I came up with was to create a second dashboard, make it admin-only, and put on there what I want for admins. Then, I update the main dashboard (using the UI!) to show what I want other users to have. It works!
Meanwhile, I notice there’s an update to 8.4. Great, I install the update.
I decide to make another update to the main dashboard. “Big mistake!”:
The default dashboard, Overview, cannot be edited from the UI. You can hide it by setting another dashboard as default.
What’s going on, here? In 7.x I could edit the main dashboard, suddenly in 8.4 I cannot? How am I supposed to edit it, now? I already switched to “UI” mode, so there’s no longer a yaml to edit. In the .storage folder, I can find the main dashboard, titled “lovelace” with no extension, in the new json format.
Is the supported editing method now to go into the .storage folder, open the lovelace file, and edit the main dashboard in a json format? It’s not as if json is particularly harder to read and understand than YAML, but for editing by hand, it’s a little more verbose. Additionally, the “raw” edit mode in the UI actually still uses YAML format, so this is a really weird disconnect.
Have I gone crazy, or did developers basically try to make it impossible to edit the overview dashboard (other than an unsupported digging into the .storage folder), even though you could already have a manually edited dashboard you made during 7.x?
There’s no issues I can see with editing the overview dashboard. I suggest something has gone a little haywire with your conversion from yaml to UI. Unfortunately I have only ever used the UI for dashboards (started HA a year ago) so not sure what you should be looking for.
When editing a dashboard from the UI, visibility can be controlled per view by clicking on the pencil icon next to the view title. I have several views on my overview dashboard that only I can see.
Alternatively a whole dashboard can be made admin only by editing it from settings > dashboards.
Edit:
I see the same message about editing the overview dashboard that you refer to if i try to click on it from settings>dashboards. I thought you meant you were having issues editing the cards but now realise you mean the access.
I’ve never done that, but i believe the correct method would be to be in edit mode on the dashboard then select raw config editor from the 3 dot menu in the top right
Yes in responding to your post I have also concluded the wording is confusing. The message in settings >dashboards refers to editing just the minimal settings that are configurable for other dashboards on that page, not actually editing the content. It’s not clear at all.
Thank you. Not being too familiar with the UI editing, I allowed that confusing message to stop me from rediscovering what I had done before. I knew I had edited it, but this convinced me I couldn’t anymore.
Message could maybe read, “The default dashboard settings cannot be changed. You can hide it by setting another dashboard as default. You can edit the layout after opening it.”
I was equally confused by the misleading text in this error message. I raised a PR to correct it slightly, let me know if you agree with the corrected wording @adipose@SgtBatten below
“Visibility settings for the default dashboard, Overview, cannot be edited from the UI. You can hide it by setting another dashboard as default.”
@SgtBatten I have just install complet new HA on my Rasberry Pi 4, I have the same contents in Overview page.
If I clieck right mouse on 3dot in top right corner, I got a image like
Once you open the edit screen, there is another 3 dots. Click those 3 dots and then you can select to take control. This will allow you to edit the dashboard how you are seeing in in your pictures.
