It would be great if areas worked like tags, so we could have meta areas. This would have been a great structure to implement for floors!
The thing is, not every entity/device is in just one area. Some, e.g. doors, are between areas. Others, e.g. weather entities, just encompass more than one (front/back yard). Others, e.g. multi-room audio systems, are physically present in more than one area.
A non-hierarchical tagging structure would be great for all of these! Speaker groups would be more intuitive, dashboards could be auto-generated more clearly, heck even graph visualizations could be made programmatically!
There were massive discussions on this topic years ago and “labels” were implemented in response. I know they might not be ideal for what you want but that was the decision the dev team made and it’s what we now have. There is also floors as yet another dedicated concept.
One additional piece of context. The devs strongly wanted areas to represent physical spaces. Since a physical device cannot exist in two places at once, devices cannot be in multiple areas. I know “between” is a challenge, but areas will not support that
[quote=“potelux, post:6, topic:817492, full:true”] Since a physical device cannot exist in two places at once, devices cannot be in multiple areas.
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Within the limited abstraction of HA, devices cannot be in two or more areas at once. That’s an architectural decision, it has nothing to do with physical reality.
My dining area’ is fully contained within my ‘living room area’. No device can be in the former without being in the latter. If I mount an LED strip along the length of the wall of the living room, it is also in the ‘sitting area’, making it physically present in three areas.
Believe me the discussions along those lines and many others were heated. I personally wish HA had gone a different way but the current model still works now that there are floors and separately labels and that’s what it is. I’m only saying this to give you context that this was recently redesigned and implemented after lengthy discussions and I don’t see any chance of it being redone in probably a decade+ though who knows. You should be able to get what you want done even if it won’t be exactly in the way you’d ideally want.
Also FWIW other companies have done similar though again that’s not the reason why HA went with it. Hue has rooms (aka areas) but separately has zones which is like labels. Not the ideal design IMHO but it works.
I am not trying to argue either way. I am simply stating what the devs discussed and decided. They decided that areas were physical, that they should not overlap, and that devices can only be in one physical location.
Seems we are on the same page then
I was actually part of the discussion around the time floors and labels were introduced. It was a very weird discussion. I remember purposely standing with one foot in my kitchen and one foot in my living room while replying to one of the devs who claimed such a thing was not physically possible. And then all of a sudden there were labels and everyone was chill.
Looks like I missed those discussions. Seems like people got entrenched and didn’t want to reconsider their positions, but yeah maybe I’ll just remove all areas and not use them.
It’s frustrating that obstinance stood in the way of the abstraction reflecting reality – in the real world, physical areas aren’t non-overlapping, from the myriad of examples provided here, in my OP, and presumably in that discussion. Oh well.
I’m pretty sure it’s more that what people wanted meant a lot of work to basically reconstruct the whole area system from the ground up to accommodate what people asked for, just like they’ve already got parts of the Role Based Access Control system in place but not really functional. They gave us some things that could be used in the meantime; floors and labels.
