WTH can we not mass-delete devices? Hundreds of nonexistent devices

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

Re-upping the 2022 (and 2020!) WTH: “WTH Can’t I mass-delete (non-existent) devices?” For a good reason: it breaks the Companion App, as it attempts to render the default “Overview” dashboard. I’m talking 2200+ entities for 780+ devices.

Over half of these (I gave up counting at 380 devices) are non-existent devices (RFXcom) that cannot be removed.

Symptom: Companion App is non-functional (seems to hang for >10 minutes on startup). Uninstall / reinstall does not help, frontend cache therefore ruled out as the main cause.

My hypothesis is that rendering 780+ devices with 2200+ entities is beyond reasonable, causing the app to hang. Since the Overview dashboard feature cannot be disabled (re-set as default on Companion App install), this is a recurring problem.

Since the app is hanging, you cannot select a different default dashboard.

Adding the capability for mass-delete would offer a permanent way to recover from this problem.

Oct '22

For unknown reasons, I ended up with hundreds of RM174RF sensors added to Home Assistant (via RFXtrx integration) - we’re talking hundreds of Smoke Detector devices, consisting of more than 2000 entities.

Currently there is no way to mass-delete these non-exists devices. When I try to delete one, I get:

Device / service not found

The best I can do at the moment is to click each device in turn, and Hide it. This is neither practical nor correct.

It would be great if the UI would allow me to select multiple devices and Hide / Detete / Force Delete them.

See Some entities not visible in RFXCOM RFXtrx

See also: Remove multiple devices

2020 WTH: WTH Delete devices from GUI
2022 WTH: Oct '22

2

disabling the device actually removes the entity from the system. What you see in that page is a “Known config” for the entity. Check back regularly and the delete option will be able to.

Mass deleting and mass disabling was added quite some time ago.

3

This was new to me and took a while to find. If you go into “Settings > Devices & Services > Entities” and apply a filter where status is “Not provided” you can see all the dead ones. The if you click the “Enter selection mode” button (next to “search entities” you can select all or one at a time - it doesn’t look like you can click/shift-click to select all between. While in selection mode the 3-dots at the top right of the screen includes “Delete selected” etc.

4

Hi Petro, I do not have an option to delete devices in my HA, see screenshot. I deleted all “not provided” entities; that made no difference. Is there another place in the UI where I should be looking?

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