Template not showing state but template shows up in jinja Editor

Installation Home Assistant OS
19

If you don’t like using an input_text for this purpose, the alternative is to use a sensor. However, there is no sensor.set_value service in Home Assistant. That makes it challenging for the automation to assign a value to a sensor.

I know of two workarounds:

  1. If you’re already using MQTT, the automation can use mqtt.publish to set the sensor’s state.
  2. @rodpayne has created a python_script, called set_state.py, that can set a sensor’s state. The automation can use python_script.set_state to set the sensor’s state.

I’ve used the first workaround so I can speak from experience about it. The sensor would look something like this:

  - platform: mqtt
    name: "last security sensor"
    state_topic: "home/last_sensor"

The automation I posted above would have the following action:

  action:
    service: mqtt.publish
    data_template:
      topic: 'home/last_sensor'
      payload: '{{ trigger.to_state.attributes.friendly_name }}'
      retain: true
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