Is there a better way of selecting entities?

When using UI components like History, selecting an entity requires using the dropdown list. I was thinking about extending the History page and overriding the dropdown by providing some sort of modal UI to allow the user to select their entity.

Why? Because the dropdown is not user friendly. Unless you know the name, and the type of entity you can be stuck with a lot of typing and mouse scrolling. Let’s say you want to look at the history of a bedroom thermostat. You remember it’s name is “bedroom” so you type that in. And your list is filled with a lot of other “bedroom” entities. You have to then scroll and find climate.bedroom and select that.

A pop up modal of entity groups would allow you to see “thermostats”, and you could click to expand and click bedroom.

Has anyone created something like this already?

In your example, try typing climate first, how many climate devices do you have after all?

That’s helpful only if you know about climate existing though, right?

I don’t know what you mean. Of course you know climate exists, you read the docs right?

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But I’m trying to make this user friendly, not developer friendly. An end user wants some history on something, say a lock or thermostat. I’m just spitballing a pop up of top level groups of things. Like, locks, thermostats, lights, etc.

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Yeah that would be nice, but users should read docs too, and you’d still have to know to click on climate.

You could perhaps be able to choose by, say, area or device as well as domain.

Yeah, I’m just throwing stuff at the wall. My AC stopped working and was trying to use the history to figure out when.

You might be beter in logbook (although the method of filtering is the same). There is also an ability now to use a notebook card in lovelace, then you can trace a few entities.

  • friendly name works.
  • any portion of friendly name works.
  • entity_id works
  • any portion of entity_id works.

It’s pretty user friendly.

If you don’t know what the name of your bedroom thermostat is, then i’m not sure a better UI would help. Simply typing bedroom would have filtered the list down, or the word thermostat if you used thermostat in the name.