Please add the ability to create and configure “Notify groups” via the UI (e.g. improve the group helper?).
This would allow users to create Notify groups to enable notifying multiple devices.
This type of “Notify group” should only be a group so not contain triggers or conditions but instead just contain a list of notify service/action, and then that group could be used and reused in automations.
Notification group use case example is creating a Notify group to send notifications to:
This would make it easer to maintain many different Notify groups where you can add, change, or remove notify entities without having to edit the automation(s) that the Notify group is being used in.
Notify groups is today a special case of groups only available via YAML configuration.
Documentation says that notify groups can only be created in YAML - but I can still create them in the UI, though unsuccessfully. If they really can only be done in YAML then why is the option to create in UI still existing? It’s awfully confusing.
Notify groups can be configured in both the UI and YAML, but each method only applies to a certain group of notification integrations.
Notifications are undergoing changes to move away from being platform/service-based to being entity-based. Currently these changes have only been made for a subset of the more basic notification integrations. The notify groups that can be created in the UI will only work for this subset.
The majority of notification integrations are still platform-based, so their groups must be configured in YAML. It seems highly unlikely that anyone will waste the development time it would take to build a separate UI method for platform-based notification integrations, and that such a thing would be added to core, when that time could possibly be used to help with the ongoing migration efforts.
but when you go into Helpers → Groups → Notify, it looks like you can create one but you only get this telling you there are no entities (screenshot below)
but the help icon takes you here… Notifications - Home Assistant
… which says if you have Notify Entities, it should work?
Those that say “only manual creation” are the older Group integration.
The ones in the UI are the recently updated (but still a work in progress) Notify integration.
At some point in the future there may only be the Notify integration, but for now we have both.
Go to your Entities menu… search for notify. … do you have any notify entities? If you do, you can group them using the Helper, but based on the screenshot you shared, you don’t.
FWIW, it is very unlikely that you have any because there are literally less than 5 notification integrations that have been converted.
I don’t know what else to tell you… These types of incremental/partial updates are pretty common.
Thank you for explaining. I only have the ‘HA-NotifyHelper update’ Notify Entity installed Seems odd they would have ported the HA Companion App notifications over first.
on this page they state there are Notify Groups and Legacy Groups (which should not be used), but they do not show an example of the proper group usage.
I have 3 phones I want to place in a group. Would the YAML be this?
Th devs could remove the confusion using Groups → Notify UI generate and install the YAML code that is needed. Then when the other services are ported to the new method, they just make that UI convert to use the new method.