WTH is there no way to create or edit scenes without realtime state changes?

Month of "What the heck?!"
22

Seriously.

I just did a search on Google with a 1 year filter and found this:
Editing scene in the ui without activating it

Please don’t go and close out other people’s tickets, @Edwin_D, over at least a five year old issue (see here) regarding a clearly undesired feature by the community by linking to a two year old ticket (which isn’t even the earliest instance I can find without at least a link to the code to go fix it themselves or even further discussion. That is toxic community behavior, in my opinion.

I would LOVE to make edits to my scenes but I have to wait for the conjoining of no one else home as well as my ability to change my scenes without waking up the whole house.

I’ve been using HA since at least 2018. Show me the merge that introduced this and I’ll fix this today.

Edit: Disregard me. I was overly frustrated in the moment and I shouldn’t have posted this. My apologies.

23

It was closed because we already have another request. Discuss on that thread. The mods prune feature requests heavily to ensure there’s only one active request for a given item. And this one… Not manipulating the lights while editing scenes is one of the oldest. That’s the only reason I can see that was closed. (and the mods will continue to immediately close duplicate asks in feature requests) But continue with the discussion.

24
  1. I agree with the request made
  2. I linked to duplicate requests with resp. over 250 votes and over 600 votes, which clearly should impress the developers more than a request with one vote. I voted for those, I invited you to do the same.
  3. The duplicate was closed by mods, not by me. They would have done the same if I had not pointed you to the existing ones. After it was closed I could not have pointed you to the existing ones any more.

TLDR: I tried to help you, I didn’t blow you off.

1 Like
25

We don’t allow duplicate feature requests because it fractures the votes into small feature requests when they should be one large feature request. This allows people who are adding features to sort by the most popular.

2 Likes
26

I voted for this request. I want it too, but it has not happened for a long time. I suspect that this is because there is a catch to implementing it. So without wanting to diminish the relevance of the request, let me explain what the difficulty is, and how I worked around it.

The basic premise of a scene is that it captures the current state of devices, so you can reproduce it. The problem comes when you want to edit an existing scene. Currently it changes the devices to the state that the scene captured. So editing the scene changes things in your home. It activates the scene so you can capture changes to that afterwards.

Now imagine what happens if HA does not change the devices to the existing settings in the scene: Then, when you edit the scene, the scene would capture the current state of the devices and entities in the scene, instead of the state that was previously in the scene. So then the devices in the home change the scene without you touching anything during editing. That would be equally bad, because it immediately ruins the scene upon editing if it captures state again.

So in order to implement this, a scene should just show the settings and allow you to change them by hand, without changing the device and without capturing current state of the device. By doing that, it would move away from the basic premise of capturing state. Then the scene would basically behave the same as a script. But we already have scripts. So why change the scene to what is basically a script, and losing what scenes do best - capturing the current state.

So although I truly dislike editing scenes because they change things in my home, and because editing scenes might capture unexpected changes like motion activated lights, I stopped waiting for developers to think of a way to fix the above dilemma. I started using scripts to define scenes by hand. They can also do more, such as use templates or conditional expressions. By using scripts I do not have to worry that some-one passing a motion sensor while editing a scene will ruin the scene.

I now only use scripts for capturing current states of entities on the fly if I want to restore them to that state later. I never have to edit those scenes anyway, and it is what they are meant to do: capture and restore.

The scenes I have written down in scripts sometimes also use conditionals, or input helpers to set the values I prefer. So they can do more than the scenes.

Maybe the solution to this request is a way to convert a captured scene to a script?

27

My use case is simpler.

I have setup my system to implement scenes for everything. Room occupied middle of the day motion - scene x.

These scenes are named in plain English and no jargon in the UI so my spouse can edit them. It works great for her. I need to edit the daytime active scene in the living room and the system just uses that in the future. Having the scene edit active lighting works amazingly well for her.

But when I’m at my desk late at night fixing things and I need to edit the scene for the master bedroom that she asked me to fix because she can’t figure out what was wrong.

Because if I open that daytime master bedroom active scene while she’s in bed asleep I WILL DIE. She will literally levitate, teleport through four walls and strangle me where I sit.

I think you’re exactly correct on the why Edwin… Unfortunately. But I haven’t given up hope… Yet. It does need to be solved.

28

@Edwin_D - alright, that’s fair enough. I came off too strong out of frustration in the moment. My bad.

1 Like
29

Fair enough. I was just feeling frustration that the 3 year running linked thread seemed liked it was spinning its wheels going nowhere and it feels like adding to that thread is talking into a void.

31

OK; Now that I’ve done my best to pay my pound in flesh for being an ass earlier lol…

Is there an active bug ticket and associated branch that I can refer to in order to help move this longstanding issue forward?

I’m an experienced software engineer (though my Python experience is more on the hobbyist side) and would be happy to take the lead on resolving this.

If not, can someone walk me through the process so I can get started on the right foot?

I’d appreciate any detailed guidance rather than just being pointed to general documentation—it’ll help me help you (and the community) in addressing this efficiently.

32

No, IIRC there is no work on this at all. No one is interested in adding it and most veterans/volunteers who are, just use yaml scenes or forego them all together for scripts which do the exact same thing.

I use the documents pretty much every time I start developing something because I forget all the commands, you should really try to go through them. There’s an entire section on setting up a development environment. If you plan to do this on windows, I can help you with the areas that are implied (like installing wsl2, docker for windows, etc).

1 Like
33

Sorry P have to disagree with ya here.

I will NOT use yaml for this as I have absolutely no interest in digging into the yaml. I’m in fact trying to do it less.

But my use case really revolves around the family. I taught them how to edit the scenes I setup. So yaml for them is not an option.

Id support a feature here the implementation (while I understand why it’s doing what it’s doing) feels very broken.

34

I’m just telling you why there’s hasn’t been development on the subject: No one that develops feels like adding it for various reasons:

  1. It’s a very complicated change
  2. You can use yaml
  3. Scripts are exactly the same

I’m not defending developers, nor am I saying that this WTH should be tossed out.

1 Like
35

My point was #2 is not valid for many use cases.

And yes it’s a horrendous change