Template Sensor Showing Unknown

Configuration
1

I have a Ring doorbell configured and running with the Ring integration. I’m trying to get one of the states exposed as a template sensor and struggling for some reason. The doorbell’s attributes look something like this

access_token: xyz
attribution: Data provided by Ring.com
video_url: https://share-service-download-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/abc
last_video_id: epcoh_time
friendly_name: Front Door
entity_picture: /api/camera_proxy/camera.front_door?token=mytoken
supported_features: 0

The attribute I’m after is video_url, so in the developer tab under states I figured out that {{ state_attr('camera.front_door', 'video_url') }} gives me what I want. I took that and created a template sensor that looks like this, modeled off the example in the docs

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      front_door_video_url:
        friendly_name: 'Front Door Video URL'
        value_template: "{{ state_attr('camera.front_door', 'video_url') }}"
        entity_id: 
          - camera.front_door

When I restart the state just returns as Unknown and I can’t figure out why. Any pointers?

2

Template sensors only change their state if one of the configured entity_id’s changes their state.


Have you tried it with homeassistant.update_entity ?
1 Like
3

I had not previously, but did so just now and still shows as unknown. Also verified that camera.front_door had a valid state (the attribute was there and populated) before running it.

4

Does the sensor change the state when you click the camera in dev tools/states (not the more-info, the link), change something in the state or the attributes an click ‘SET STATE’?

5

You’re onto something! I tried just adding an attribute and setting it, so I went from

access_token: <removed>
attribution: Data provided by Ring.com
video_url: <removed>
last_video_id: <removed>
friendly_name: Front Door
entity_picture: /api/camera_proxy/camera.front_door?token=<removed>
supported_features: 0

to

access_token: <removed>
attribution: Data provided by Ring.com
video_url: <removed>
last_video_id: <removed>
friendly_name: Front Door
entity_picture: /api/camera_proxy/camera.front_door?token=<removed>
supported_features: 0
new_feature: test

When I did that the state stayed as unknown. But when I changed the actual video URL from what was there to, quite literally, bbbbb the template sensor updated to be bbbbb.

The URL that’s present is quite long, and does have a number of special (albeit URL safe) characters. Is it possible that something is making the template to be unhappy? Is there a way to make sure that everything is being escaped?

6

A state can’t be longer than 255 chars, but that should raise an error in the logs, or something has changed in one of the last updates.

7

I’d checked the logs, but never expanded it to the full log (only looked at the summary). I did however do that now and sure enough I found the error below. Guess that answers my question, thanks for helping me work through that. Time to switch tactics for this automation trigger.

2020-08-03 15:37:10 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant] Error doing job: Task exception was never retrieved
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 277, in async_update_ha_state
    self._async_write_ha_state()
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 402, in _async_write_ha_state
    self.hass.states.async_set(
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/core.py", line 1019, in async_set
    state = State(entity_id, new_state, attributes, last_changed, None, context)
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/core.py", line 766, in __init__
    raise InvalidStateError(
homeassistant.exceptions.InvalidStateError: Invalid state encountered for entity id: sensor.front_door_video_url. State max length is 255 characters.
8

If you want to trigger an automation with the video_url attribute, why not use a template trigger?

EDIT: Forget the template trigger, that should evaluate to true.
But you can use the state trigger with the camera as entity_id and check the video_url has changed with a template condition and the Trigger state object.

9

That was initially the road I’d gone down, and in the process found this thread which was someone essentially trying to do the same thing and seeing the same issues I was (only fired on the initial boot). I did however notice this reply which seems like it’ll work perfectly. Does that seem reasonable or am I coming at this a bad way?

Your edit appeared as soon as I hit save. I think we arrived at the same thing :slight_smile:

10

Hi. I didn’t read this whole topic, or re-read the whole topic referenced, but I can tell you one thing – that post of mine that you linked is WAY OLD!! :smile:

Today I would recommend the following for the condition:

      condition: template
      value_template: >
        {{ trigger.from_state is not none and
           trigger.to_state is not none and
           trigger.to_state.attributes.temperature !=
           trigger.from_state.attributes.temperature }}
11

Old yes, but did the trick! Appreciate the update though, I’ll add in those other conditions to control for no state, that’s a good call.