Implement explicitly named "none" entity for portability?

Feature Requests
21

Thanks Taras,

Yey! That’s the missing piece in my puzzle! Awesome! I was looking in the wrong direction entirely. I wasn’t expecting a meta-tag idea :rofl:

Regards,
Hammy

1 Like
22

Hi tom,

I appreciate that! It’s probably fair to say it was a real life rather than a real world example. It wasn’t a case of programmatically disabling something, just editing something so it didn’t fire off and break UI/syntax parsing. I just didn’t know how and went the programmer head way.

Would you like the funny story now? :slight_smile:

Regards,

Hammy

23

Well, I’ve just came up with a situation that made me wanna try it. Kinda disappointed.

Reason

I’ve just moved into a new apartment. There’s a lot to be removed/changed, but there are parts of the setup I used to have that I still wanna keep.

At this particular moment, I do not have motion sensors in my kitchen (yet). I’ve got a group kitchen_motion_sensors that I still wanna keep (it’s used in automations and presented in Lovelace widgets). But… I can not remove all the entities it contains. I have to either remove the whole group config or… (badum tsss) provide a dummy entity.

The Demo Integration

It actually provides a lot of entities. Including binary_sensor.movement_backyard which I could put into my kitchen_motion_sensors group, so that the group config is still valid, even though – temporarily – I don’t really have any motion sensors in the kitchen.

Problems

Mind that these are not problems with Demo integration per se, but just failed expectation for a proposed solution to my particular needs (as being the “dummy entities provider”).

  • Naming: as I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to explicitly see that the dummy is a dummy. Therefore, I’d like to have naming like Demo: Binary Sensor (binary_sensor.demo_entity) – doesn’t have to be exactly like that, but it should be obvious. For example, the binary_sensor.movement_backyard looks like a “real entity”, so I can’t see with a quick glance that this is just temporary patch (to be replaced ASAP).
  • Configurability: The aforementioned binary_sensor.movement_backyard is always ON. I’d like to be able to turn it ON/OFF easily for testing purposes. I know that I can override the state using Developer Tools -> States panel, but it would be much easier if the “device” included an input boolean to controlling the binary_sensor value.

Solution for now

I’m removing the Demo integration and just creating my own dummy entities manually. At least the naming scheme will be obvious (like binary_sensor.virtual_binary_sensor or binary_sensor.dummy_binary_sensor).

24

I agree the entity names should clearly indicate they’re part of the Demo integration.