WTH Do I still need to be a rocket scientist to get things done in HA

[finity]

@Boilerplate4u

Well, great for you, but you’re probably not the average Joe.

Well…yeah…

But I can neither confirm nor deny if that is a good thing.

@Boilerplate4u

one would almost need a degree in aerospace engineering to navigate the documentation, which is unsurprisingly disorganized

I agree that the documentation isn’t great.

I think tho that some of the recent documentation changes have been clouded by the move to configuring things via the UI. Again to make it more user friendly.

that results in an integration documentation page which is basically saying:

“click this button so that ‘My’ can take you to the HA integrations page and follow the prompts there”. And that’s it.

But what happens if the prompts are vague or not well specified?

I think I’ve had more problems trying to configure some integrations via the UI because I need to try to figure out what the integration config flow field is looking for than most of the yaml configured integrations that have structured documentation tables along with examples.

of course you also need to temper the “easy” expectations by understanding that you are still dealing with a pretty technical piece of software. So the user will always need to know what some technical terms mean. I don’t think there will ever be a way of getting away from that and still maintaining the power of HA.

EFP

@ToonK

on top of that it gives error-messages that make no sense to someone learning the syntax

I 100% agree.

Unless it’s a direct reference to a yaml syntax error then error messages in the log are more like reading tea leaves than a real tool to help find the problem.

@ToonK

At the moment the error-messages even go so far as to give an indentation-error when you actually had some ‘fault’ in the contents of one of the items before the item with the indentation.

@ToonK

And perhaps there could even be a ‘fix my indentation’-button or a ‘highlight what is wrong and suggest what to change’-button

these two are related.

when you do a config check (when it works to catch errors - which isn’t always the case - which is another probable WTH - that I should post about) it will tell you what the problem looks like it could be to the checker.

remember that the error checker can’t read the users mind but only find issues in syntax/structure.

So maybe not a button but the functionality is mostly there.

@ToonK

Studio Code Server

That’s the tool I was mentioning earlier.

EDIT TO ADD:

I just posted a WTH about the config checker here:

WTH does the config checker not report all errors in syntax or structure

I’ve commented on this before but now that we have a WTH, why not try again. The config checker will most times find errors in yaml config and correctly report them. But there are times when the config check passes but then when you go look at the automation that you just created with an error the automation is disabled due to errors that weren’t reported by the config checker. It’s not as if the system is unaware of the error because it’s smart enough to disabled the automation that contains…