WTH: Why don't sensors show logbook in dialog?

Month of "What the heck?!"
21

Text sensors showing as bar graphs without a listed history is extremely counter intuitive.

22

Ok :+1:

1 Like
23

I have reached out to the developer of the lock integration that is giving me this issue. I asked him to not assign a unit of measure to the sensors as it seems that is what stops the logbook style history from appearing in the more info.

24

Thatā€™s not what stops it. If itā€™s a set of known words, it should be an enum sensor.

25

Itā€™s just a text sensor with last user name. Is there no way at all to manually override and get a listed history showing in more info?

26

I understand your point generally. If I may throw in an altenative/workaround? This card might offer what youare looking for: GitHub - royto/logbook-card: Logbook card for Home Assistant UI Lovelace

27

I do use that and itā€™s very helpful.

I have an automation to publish the useless bar graph no history sensor into an input text sensor. This way the new sensor shows the current and history just like I need.

However if this this type of work around is required to return this function than maybe someone should address the introduced bug and return the functionality.

1 Like
28

There is no introduced bug. This is a feature request.

29

In my searches I found it mentioned this came with a previous update.

30

I didnā€™t see a reply to this but, is there a way to manaully override an individual sensor so itā€™s recorded?

Iā€™ve got something like the plex ā€œwatchingā€ count sensor, it has the unit of measurement ā€œWatchingā€ on it, and it has no logbook entries. This sensor has a very low cardinality, as it only uses whole numbers, and in my case typically from 0-5 range, but I canā€™t figure out if thereā€™s a way to manaully allow this for logbook tracking.

31

make an automation to log that.

- alias: Log Plex Watching
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: sensor.plex_watching
  action:
      - service: logbook.log
        data:
          name: Plex
          message: {{ trigger.to_state.state }} are watching plex
          # Optional
          entity_id: sensor.plex_watching
          domain: sensor
32

Thanks, this gets me started in the right direction.

One problem I have is that I see the entry in the general logbook page - but I cannot filter on the entity_id. Itā€™s just not in the filter pulldown. Since I canā€™t filter on it, adding it to my dashboard also comes up with nothing still. Iā€™m not sure why i can see it in the general logbook list but canā€™t filter on it.

Iā€™m assuming here that the entity_id (sensor.plex_watching) needs to be an existing sensor or does it need to be something new that gets created?

Edit: Figured it out. Canā€™t be done. Even writing it to the log with the above code it still gets excluded from the DB because itā€™s a sensor that has a ā€œunit of measurementā€ and those are auto purged. Kind of crappy there is no work around there. The solution was to make a new sensor that just took the state of the plex sensor, excluding all the other attributes.

plex_watch_count:
  friendly_name: "Plex Watch Count"
  value_template: '{{ states("sensor.plex_my_nas") }}'