WTH Why is it so cumbersome to see the Attributes of an Entity from the Dashboard?

[markusressel]

I have this light on my dashboard which I want to see the attributes for:

Opening the detail view for this entity is showing the “use” experience, which is of course fine, but does not contain attributes:

Now, at the top there are these options:

• History
• Settings
• Device info
• Edit favorite colors
• Related

Going to “Device info” jumps to the related Device page, which is great, but still doesn’t show the attributes of the entity:

From this point on there is no way to go anywhere else that shows attributes. Clicking on the “control” will open the same “use” dialog as before.

If we go to "Settings instead, we see this screen:

which shows the entity id, but still no attributes, and no way to jump to the dev tool “states” page or similar.

Seeing the attributes is crucial for creating automations, so being able to see them at a glance would be really helpful, even if its a “dev feature”.

Proposal

Link to “States” dev page

It would be helpful to have a simple button somewhere on the “Settings” page that jumps to the “States” dev page, with a prefilled filter for the given entity. The “States” dev page already contains the attributes, so this would probably be the most simple way to improve this workflow.

Show attributes directly within the dialog

I am not sure why attributes are shown on some entites and not on others. For example, when clicking on a Person entity, the Dialog does indeed contain attributes at the bottom (not showing for privacy reasons):

But even there the list of shown attributes is not the full list, but some partial list without any indication in the UI that there are more attributes besides the one that are shown.

Showing all attirbutes might not be a great UX/UI since they can be quite technical, but hiding them entirely can also be very cumbersome and misleading.

Maybe there is a middleground somwhere
Thx for reading!

[allard77 (Allard K)]

Tile cards can show attributes, but they are called ‘features’ in the ui. They won’t show every attribute though, it’s pretty limited

[mobile.andrew.jones (Andrew Jones)]

Have to agree that any entity that has attributes should show those attributes, I don’t mind if by default they don’t show up like they don’t currently, until the advanced mode is enabled for your user profile.

[peterxian]

I knew I saw attributes in the UI somewhere (other than in the Developer Tools “States” tab, of course), but apparently it’s limited to device trackers only? Seems like a decent start, but would make more sense for this to be consistent throughout the interface.

[NathanCu (Nathan Curtis)]

Well it’s probably not exactly what you want to hear but there is a developer architecture decision document somewhere (one frhe mods probably knows) that basically agreed with you.

So the short version says - if your information should be surfaced in the UI it should be it’s own entity. Pushing new stuff to prefer creating entities instead of attributes and making them easier to surface (notice there are more entities in most new integrations on avg than two yrs ago?)

So net is you long term get your wish but it takes time, short term it doesn’t help too much because it also means the dev team is unlikely to give love to thi gs meant to surface those attributes that should mostly go away.

That said there is a reason to use attributes in some (important) cases so maybe them becoming more important when they’re there may mean more need to surface them easier…

[markusressel]

@NathanCu There is no need to wait for hundreds of Integrations to adapt and change attributes into entities to make this easier. As I have mentioned a simple button in the “Settings” page that links go the Dev Tools (if possible prefilled) would already help a lot to give at least some way to see all attributes. Currently there is no way at all if you don’t know that you can copy paste the entity id, go to Dev tools, states, paste the id into the filter, and hope your browser is wide enough to display attributes.

Also, there are attributes that will never go away. F.ex. light entities have a color_mode attribute, which indicates the current color_mode of that light entity. It wouldn’t make sense to break out this information into a separate entity because it’s linked to the light entity, yet knowing about this attribute and it’s value can be of value in automations. There are probably many other examples similar to this.