Make Groups Useful - they lack near everything needed

Feature Requests
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1

Context:
Groups provide only 5% of what is needed for grouping and using entities in automation. To do complex automations using many items at once is 100x verbose and complicated without the below features.

Imagine you have over 400 entities and most require grouping to efficiently automate - otherwise you need have triggers and/or conditions for each entity (5, 10, even 20) in each automation, separately… now imagine needing to check the values of each in another automation. And that is the most basic situation.

Feature Requests:

  1. Query to list all entities in a group, and the values of each so we can place the resultant list in a Card or something to visibly show status

  2. Dynamic Groups : Rules based auto-update for groups. Dynamically refreshes membership when any device/entities is added or removed in the entire system. Rules would allow creation based on Area, Name, Tags, etc, etc

  3. Triggers for group entity changes
    @petro made a similar request was posted 2 YEARS ago (WTH!) Why isn't there a group's entities state trigger?

my old system has all of these…

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For all of those it would be sufficient if the entity_id option of the state and numeric state triggers supported templates as we already have the group expand() function, e.g.

triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: "{{ expand(group.foobar) }}" 
    etc...

Though Petro’s solution is neater for your use case this way would be far more powerful, allowing for other templates than just expanding groups. Just food for thought.

Don’t forget to vote for your own request.

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