I am looking for a way to generate a hierarchical visualisation of my house. Both by actual physical space and by purpose.
To give a bit of a background - I have a three storey house with a garage and almost every room has a few devices in it that either provide data or sensor readings. These are not entities you use every day but it is useful to navigate to the current room and see what’s in there, both for regular use and troubleshooting.
With Openhab, this was stupidly easy - every entity belongs to a group that combines all functions of a device, that group belongs to a group that represents the room, the room group belongs to a floor etc. That device group also belongs to the functional group, say smoke detectors.
In my UI, I just expose the top level groups (floors) and functional parents (smoke sensors) and I get automatically generated, browseable hierarchy of my setup.
I have been reading on areas, which are a no-go as they do not allow nesting and grouping seems to be more about control.
With great difficulty and a lot of hacking about. HA just isn’t designed that way sadly.
I’ve tried many different routes, but ultimately you have to manage everything with Groups and largely ignore areas as irrelevant.
You’d think they’d try to make Areas hierarchical, but instead, they recently added ‘Floors’ to group areas—a bizarre and massive misstep that effectively rules out a proper hierarchy in the future. Instead, we have a new half-baked floor concept, where you can assign an icon (but can’t currently retrieve it easily).
Frankly, ‘areas’, ‘floors’, ‘domains’, ‘integration’, etc., should all just be attributes on entities, to allow for true extensibility and make the codebase and use so much easier. They decided to go a different (but well trod and rejected) path.
That’s what I’ve figured. I think this is really a shame, I suppose the floors may work well for a specific subset of users but honestly this makes HA sound more like to a toy and not for any more “serious” use. (even home-serious, not to mention anything beyond that).