WTH why are Helper History Stats issues so difficult to track down

I am struggle bussing my way through creating a helper to report if a binary sensor was off in the past 24 hours, should be simple enough… right?. The first window is easy enough to select but the Options is driving me mad.

There are a few main issues as I see it:

The failure of Start or End input is a debug level log message, which means it never bubbles up to the user if they do not spend a whole lot of time looking at logs. It is not a notification or any indication on the helper that it is failing other then it does not associate to an entity ID.

The window does not do validation of the input to guide the user if it has a chance of working. Ideally submit should try to implement it and if there is a failure creating it then have a popup with the failure message.

If either start or end are non-functional it is not possible to remove the helper nor edit the initial configuration of it.

There is no option to view the yaml to make manual changes.

I cannot change any of the options in the beginning window, or even ever look at them again to remind myself what I selected.

It would be nice if there was some help to do some of the basics of what a user may want with yaml as a backup. Similar to this comment.

In my case I cannot seem to satisfy conversion of values to compare which I only found by enabling debug logging, installed logger add-on, have the logs spamming while I input slight changes to the start time.

You have some valid points, but this specifically I believe was fixed in 2024.12. Now I believe helpers that fail to setup correctly have a viewable error message in the helpers table, can open settings to correct the templates, or can be deleted from the helpers table.

Before this change it was much harder to resolve, so do try a latest version.

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