My request is pretty simple and will help to unify Home Assistant more.
Currently, the notify API is pretty diversified coming from the endpoint’s perspective. The endpoint (being a HTML5 browser, the official app or an AndroidTV) all support different configuration.
What I am proposing is to unify this a bit, starting by adding support for (camera) entity_id in the data. The end-result of this, is that the logic behind the notify will automatically convert this into the appropriate data for their endpoint.
The use case I have in mind is that by providing an entity_id of a camera, the data will automatically be converted to include attributes for a picture coming from the camera at least but perhaps some more attributes can be set that are helpful.
I did not think about this idea myself, the official home assistant app has supported this for some time already:
{
"message": "Someone is at the door!",
"title": "🔔 Doorbell",
"data": {
"entity_id": "camera.doorbell_high"
}
}
The exact reason for doing this, is that it can be a pain to implement notifications for each endpoint separately. Instead, I just have a notify group called “EVERYONE” and I included every device supporting notifications in it. It would be a shame if I had to create the logic for each notification separately and differently due to different attributes being supported.