WTH lets upgrade History Graphs

Like @juanmijm said - there is an modern, intuitive, ressourcefriendly, flexible Card out there. After the Creator unfortunatly left the Community, he opened it on the MIT Licence, so there is no Need to reinvent the Wheel. Probably catch some breaking changes.

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There is another post very similar to this one and it is a shame to divide efforts and votes between two:

Please vote in both guys!

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Hi.

Good idea that I would like to support with my vote :slight_smile:
The fact that there are now several (6) current WTH topics specifically dealing with suggestions and good ideas for improvements to the history graph, shows that it is effectively time to bring out something new and more performant.

I have also created a WTH topic to this theme:

And here are another 4 actual WTH topics on the same theme:

So, vote diligently and hope for a new history graph :slight_smile:

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Hi, these days I mess a lot with history graphs.
They so useful for troubleshooting or maybe creating a tailored automation for custom device.
The control of time seems to be very outdated. The life will be so much easier if we could control this on some Easy manner. Idea came to my head if we could have a two knobs like in the old oscilloscope And by turning them, we could play with the time and shift the graph from left to right, this will be awesome. Olso make some nice interface we could rename it from History to Scope for example.

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Totally agree! Have a look at custom history explorer. It’s been out there for a long time, and I can’t imagine working with the standard history graph again.
For me, everything needed is (almost) already there, and highly configurable as well. This is how a history graph needs to look and feel like.

A proper revamped history graph replacing this outdated would be awesome!

I’ve been complaining (to myself) about the Home Assistant history for a long time, it’s something that I don’t understand how it can still be so bad (despite the latest changes and improvements that have been applied), it’s really tedious and frustrating to look at something there, almost forcing me to use Grafana or other means for it (which is also very tedious to configure, but at least it’s more functional)

As I was already fed up a few days ago I started to investigate how I could improve this, then I discovered this project:

Which has been abandoned, but I’ve used a fork that works perfectly continued here:

  • Before putting this post, I’ve seen some other ones that talked about improving some aspect of the history, such as being able to zoom, but I’m opening a new one because I think that what needs to be improved is much more, what we need is a totally renewed history, just like the original project from alexarch21

Searching a little more I found this old post from 2022, in which there was already a comment talking about alexarch21’s project:

I see that the post currently has 421 votes and a lot of people interested in this, but unfortunately it is an old post and already archived.

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Dear developers (hope this will be read and responded by one of the developers):

WTH: I have never understood in Home Assistant till today is the poor implementation of the device value history graph function. It still seems to be underdeveloped (prehistoric) compared to the rest of all great monthly released Home Assistant features.

To me the history graph or data tables seems to be one of the key functions to read and interpret our smart home data but it’s now too basic and fails often. Please take a look at domoticz how they did this. Just to get an impression.

What’s in my opinion could be improved in favour of the majority of Home Assistant users?

  • Zoom in/out (pinch/scroll to zoom on IOS/scroll to zoom to decrease/increase the graph time scale.) Now users must make too many steps and many clicks for selecting for example the last hour of received data. Unfortunately totally unusable for daily analyse of entity values.
  • Make it possible to point at any position above the graph line to show the data. Now on IOS it requires you to EXACTLY touch the plotted graph line to show the values. This is terrible. Even worse: When you want to see the value in a graph the shown values are exactly displayed under your finger tips. I now need to redo my touch selection min. 5 times to make sure it shows the correct point in time and I touched really the lowest value. It’s not usable like this and so not user friendly.
  • Make it possible to show with one button click the RAW historic data in a table. Such as time and value in per row.
  • Make it possible to sort values in the displayed data table eg. the averge/highest/lowest, descending/… in last day, last hour
  • Make it possible to choose a second/third sensor the present two or more values in one chart such temperature/humidity/pressure/other sensor data.
  • Make it possible to show different graphs such as BAR charts and other.
  • Any other of the forum users has a better idea?

Your respond to this request is much appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.

6 Likes

There is another post very similar to this one and it is a shame to divide efforts and votes between two:

Please vote in both guys!

Hi.

Good idea that I would like to support with my vote :slight_smile:
The fact that there are now several (6) current WTH topics specifically dealing with suggestions and good ideas for improvements to the history graph, shows that it is effectively time to bring out something new and more performant.

I have also created a WTH topic to this theme:

And here are another 4 actual WTH topics on the same theme:

So, vote diligently and hope for a new history graph :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Searching HACS doesn’t appear to find this card…? Has it been removed from the default repositories?

Add a custom repo

Very happy to, but didn’t want to if it was unnecessary… The Github readme states: " The history explorer card is now part of the default HACS Home Assistant Community Store. This is the preferred way to install this card.", without mentioning the need for a custom repository.
Thanks :slight_smile:

Then why posting this? )

At the risk of going completely off topic! My thought process was:

  1. Read about the integration, thought it looked interesting, investigate further
  2. Read the Github readme, notice it’s a fork, notice it says “default HACS”
  3. Search HACS, not found
  4. Wonder if the integration had previously been in HACS but had been removed for some reason?
  5. Asked the question

I hope that makes my brain process clearer… I should, perhaps, raise a documentation issue against the Github repo…?

Thanks :slight_smile:

The original history-explorer-card was archived and was removed from HACS.
A fork of this card seems to be not added yet to HACS, a custom repo should be added.

3 Likes

I can totaly agree. History is one of the core functions of Home Assistant. It cannot keep up with other systems and does not comply with the otherwise very modern smart home software. I tried myself in understanding the Source Code and was able to add at least a Previous and Next-Button to be able to move between the timeranges. It is Part of Home Assistants since the 2024-12-Release, see: add previous and next button to History and Logbook by boern99 · Pull Request #22802 · home-assistant/frontend · GitHub. We now try to improve the styles, so that the buttons can also be used on mobiles. As a next step, I currently also try to add buttons for Zoom-In and Out. Buttons are a quick win because they can be added relatively easily into the existing source code. To be able to scroll or zoom: This is more demanding: Looks like a new base would probably be necessary.
I also added some Information on this on my website[New: Home Assistant history: previous and next buttons]

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Other aspects of the History card (I really don’t want to add a fresh WTH as it dilutes the votes)

  • Reorder the entities
  • deselect entites from view (but don’t delete from card).
  • more flexible time/date picker - e.g. not just last year but last 12 months or last x months or since date x (same for days/hours laxt 7 days 12hrs etc - this is different to ‘last week’).
  • Save a view
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Hi @baz123
Thanks for your interest and your contribution to improving this card in HA. There are certainly many other good and useful ideas that could be brought in.
Here just one more example:

The ability to hide the multiple timestamps in the X-axis and display them as desired. This would also make the graphs clearer, as I often find it pointless to see this information multiple times on one card, especially when you could work with the “readout cursor”, which I aske for in the linked feature request above :wink:
It would be ideal, for example, if you could flexibly choose how the time axis stamps are displayed:

  • Either as it is now, with one time axis stamp per graph.
  • Or only display it once (top or bottom or in the middle of several graphs)
  • Or display it twice (top and bottom)
  • Or display it three times (top, bottom and middle)
  • Or maybe even display it dynamically, so that there is only one timeline stamp, but it jumps when you scroll and so stays always visible.

Of course, it all depends on how many graphs you want to display at the same time and how you work with them, but it could definitely be helpful.

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I use PlotlyJS card to explore history. The data selection engine is awesome, it allows you to select any data from HA, transform and combine them and present them in a nice UI. It’s not built-in but it wiill do the job until the history graph evolves.

Is there any Christmas present? :heart:

5 Likes