Where to store a small data table needed to calculate sensors

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1

Hi

I would like to calculate something like rain/temperature anomalies to display in the front end. I have a table of long-term rainfall and average temps for each week at my location, let’s say 4 columns of floats time 52 weeks. It is simple to create a statistics/template sensor to e.g. track the total rainfall over the last 7 days and compare with the long-term average.

But where do I actually store the data table? There isn’t a natural input_table entity where I could put it. What’s the kosher way of doing this?

I could just hardcode it into the template sensor as a list, but that seems a bit too hacky?

2

You could create a google spreadsheet, then use a RESTFul sensor to create a sensor in HA that has all of the information in the attributes of that sensor all pulled from the spreadsheet.

3

Encode the table as JSON and store it in an input_text entity? There is a template tag to parse json.

4

This is an interesting idea… Is there the 255 character maximum for an input_text? But maybe I can write it as an attribute of some input_entity as @arretx suggests?

5

Oh right, I forgot about the limit. But it should also be possible to read from a file, according to this documentation: File - Home Assistant

There is even an example for json. And json could be written in a single line, if I’m not mistaken.

6

In the end 365 floats is not very much memory…

So I’ve put the data table into a custom jinja template macro which returns a value form it. This way is can be used by multiple templates if need be without retyping.