@frenck I hope we can have Labels soon. They would help here as well as with the highest voted WTH: Why are automations in one big list?
The Hierarchy approach is good, but still a little limiting. I think the best approach is what was suggested in the thread by doing area âtagsâ. This will be more powerful. Think of the below scenario.
A closet in in a specific room bedroom that is on specific floor. In the Hierarchy approach, you could letâs say âturn off all lights on the 2nd Floorâ and everything in the 2nd floor would be turned off including all the sub areas or âturn off all lights in the master Bedroomâ which would turn off lights in the Master Bedroom area which would also include the closet. What you could not do is lets say " Turn off All closet lights" because the closet area is a sub area of master bedroom. (i understand that this can be overcome with groups)
The better approach would be with tags, in which you can assign multiple tags. Again, using the closet as a use case. you can tag the Master Bedroom closet with multiple tags (Closet, Master Bedroom, 2nd Floor) or outdoor lights in which you could tag as Front yard, back yard, Christmas lights, etc.
Again, I fully understand that you can do this with groups. But it would require you to create many groups to satisfy all the scenarios. While tagging would satisfy this more easily.
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I agree that hierarchy does not satisfy all scenarios, but I think hierarchial areas would have one big advantage in automatically adding new entities in the closet to bedroom and 2nd floor. Then a tagging system to manually tag the closet entity with closet as well would be satisfy the other scenarios.
According to my experience if you always need to manually tag something it will be done in the beginning and later on forgot about.
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+1 for tag approach
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Maybe there could be a compromise, by doing a little of both. I think having a tier for Floors/Levels/ exterior/ etc makes perfect sense. So when something is added to i.e. a bedroom it gets automatically added to second floor. But having tags for other items will really add flexibility as I indicated in previous post.
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I know Home Assistant has a different purpose⊠but by way of comparison letâs talk about the Alexa app.
There, what comes closest to areas are the groups, and it is possible to include a group within another group. So if I have a group for each physical room and I create another one called Home that contains all the others, I will be able to command (on/off) the entire house in a single command.
Thinking like that, I think it would be an evolution for the areas to allow the area of ââan area to be defined, so we can have a Home area that contains the areas that represent the physical spaces. When run a service in an area, all devices within that area and within all areas that âbelongâ to that area would be commanded.
It may seem confusing, but in the daily life of the user I think it would make more sense and be intuitive.
But I think this could be implemented regardless of whether the labels will be implemented or not (the labels will help a lot in the organization from what Iâve noticed).
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Most windows, doors, roofs, and walls are in two places at once. A set of stairs can be in multiple places at once.
I think the hierarchical approach is the wrong way to go about this.
Make locations tag-like relations. Any device or entity can be tagged with multiple location tags, and can be mapped accordingly. Location tags can have their own tags, implying super-sets, sets, and subsets.
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Exactly. Are those lights on the staircase âdownstairsâ in the âentrywayâ or are they âupstairsâ in the âloftâ?
If thereâs only one switch down by the base of the stairs, you could argue that the control is downstairs but most stairs have at least two switches wired up in 3 way configuration so the lights can be controlled from top or bottom.
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Though the âLabelsâ functionality would be a great addition, I think extending the âAreaâ would be much much better in this case, as they represent completely different target functionality.
Sure, they have some overlap in definition, but so do the âgroupsâ and âzonesâ functions.
Stating that a device can only be in one âAreaâ and/or an âAreaâ cannot be part of another âAreaâ, is basically the same as stating that the world is 2 dimensional and the earth is flat.
Besides that, it would be more user an admin friendly to use areas.
I already have a sh*tload of entities & devices in my HA setup. Assigning all the labels to them, piece-by-piece, will be painstaking work and will cost me a few nights of sleep. And with every new entity or device , there will be the need to assign a whole range of labels (time consuming).
Most HA setups already have their devices and/or entities assigned to an area and areas have the psychological advantage that admins and users donât have to think about what parent (or child) area, an attached area belongs to (when I say âwalk-in-closetâ, I donât have to think hard that this room is part of the âmaster bedroomâ, which is part of âbedroomsâ, which is part of âsecond floorâ, which is part of âindoorsâ.)
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For me personally, this feature doesnât make much sense, but I can see how it could be useful to some people. If I put something in the area called walk-in-closet, for example, that itâs in or attached to the master bedroom isnât something I feel is relevant to my particular use case for Home Assistant.
Has there been any updates on this topic in the UI?
I am new to HA and finding setup confusion when assigning lights to areas for this very reason.
Iâve heard groups exist but they arenât the thing that shows up in the UI. The overview page automatically adds areas together but groups are not.
I like the idea of a UI hierarchy drag and drop sorting and indenting as the OP shows in later post.
Any updates?
That is completely untrue. I have an open kitchen. I can have one leg in the kitchen and one in the living room. I can also install an LED strip that is both in the kitchen and the living room. Moreover, nothing can be in my living room without also being on the ground floor. I would argue the opposite: it is physically impossible for any object to be only in one physical space. Because every space is inside another space. I would love to see Home Assistant better reflect that reality.
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This is why I suggested getting away from hierarchy.
Tagging would allow anything in one or more locations, to my hearts content.
An odd, but very apropo example - recently I was talking to someone who was working on her mushroom growing room. She wanted to add nutrient to a specific misting line. The line goes through multiple spaces, and splits out to multiple misting heads/misters. Tagging would allow marking the line at any location, and misting head. Misted areas with the nutrient could be marked with the tag; it could be âinheritedâ. A dashboard could show the line, and what areas have the nutrient âtagâ. There is no simple way to to do this in the current hierarchical structure.
Home Assistant is way beyond just âhome assistanceâ. I have seen it in use for industrial and farming automation in small businesses.
FYI, there is a current architecture proposal with discussion about nested areas here:
Seems that PR for floors are also drafted. Hopefully itâs the right term / direction, also not (yet) fully convinced âŠ
Thanks for pointing out the PRs. I guess now Iâm wondering what the point of the architecture âdiscussionâ wasâŠ
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I agree it wasnât much of a collaborative discussion.
The comment by tetele summarizes it well: they chose the word âareaâ so it could represent any kind of space you want (as opposed to âroomâ) but then chose âfloorâ which means only one thing.
Allowing for nested areas would permit whatever kind of spatial organization one desires. In contrast, a floor is a floor is a floor; canât use it in a sensible manner to define pool and patio areas inside a backyard âfloorâ.
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It is really a pity, once floors introduced dream of nested groups will most likely be gone.
At the very beginning of my smart home career I also named everything with the floor name, but I identified very fast that this is not really helpful. Grouping of individual areas would indeed be helpful. Letâs seeâŠ
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The most disappointing part of that âdiscussionâ is that so far everyone that has responded is providing a bunch of examples of why floors arenât a useful thing to spend time and energy on, but they donât seem to care.
Nevermind the fact that this does very little for someone like myself that has a single story home. It seems like another very weird hill to die on.
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Like if they have complete control over the projectâs direction? 
For anyone who isnât aware, the person promoting âfloorâ is Home Assistantâs founder.
Despite numerous compelling attempts to promote the advantages of nested areas, looks like weâre going to get âfloorsâ to group areas.