When you select an integration you can select the related devices or entities.
When you select a device, it lists the related entities and it shows you all the related automations, scenes, scripts, and the logbook.
When you click on the entity and then choose related it will show you all sorts of stuff.
But there isn’t a spot that shows you all the different Actions (FKA Services) you can run on that entity. The only option is to go to Developer Tools…Actions…Select an action and then see what entities can use it.
I think the reason for a dedicated break out listing available actions is because it’s dynamic both over time for a single device as changes are made monthly, as well as from device to device. If I have a light entity, I can of course read the docs, but the information is available in HA readily and could be displayed directly that this entity can be turned on, off, toggled, or affected by some 3rd party integration that adds another operation to items in the light domain. (Which wouldn’t be available in the light entity documentation)
for any particular integration, yep, definitely, it’s a rare event. But for Home Assistant at large, given the number of new and modified integrations every month, expecting some kind of ongoing change to one of my 75+ installed integrations every few months isn’t unreasonable, and constantly re-reading documentation of all of them in hopes of catching the change that, as you say, individually is rare seems a bit silly.
I think your original premise is false, that there’s an easy way to get at all the actions for an entity in the linked documentation.
To use a concrete example: I have an ecobee5, synced using HomeKit. If I want to see what actions are available on my climate.ecobee5, then I open the entity from the search bar → click the dot menu → click Device Info → Click the HomeKit Device integration → Click Documentation, and end up at the HomeKit controller documentation, which tells me nothing about any of the available climate control actions.
I think the core WTH here is that it should be easier to look up "I have an entity. What actions could act on this entity, based on the entity filters on all the actions that take an entity as an argument?
The naive solution is to say “Well, you should just type in climate to the Actions drop down in Developer tools” or “you should already know about the docs for climate entities”, but even this is an incomplete solution, and makes HA less accessible to new users to boot.
Any of the available actions from different integrations can apply their own actions filtered however they want, such as the Bond integration, provides the ability to set the tracked light state, which filters itself as applicable only to light entities provided by the bond integration, some of which are of the light.* domain, but doesn’t include all lights.
I think this is a very reasonable discoverability WTH callout that it’s hard to go from entity → applicable actions, but easy to go from actions → applicable entities, and it would make it much easier to learn to write automations for your items if we made that discoverability story easier.
Found this WTH when I was trying to find out why callable Actions/Services are not listed on the Device page. I think it would be a really useful addition.
One other example where I think this would be useful is User defined actions in ESPHome. These convert to Homeassistant actions and here you don’t really have a documentation page that would help.
Because the actual actions and parameters are quite often documented in the code (and therefore in devtools) better than they are in the documentation… and it would also be fantastic to fire any of these actions directly from that screen instead of having to wade to dev tools for that.
What I meant to say is that the action code ships with YAML files that document each action and each parameter, and that appears onscreen in devtools. If that appeared under the integration or device, just like scripts and automations related to a device do today, that would be fantastic.
