WTH? Why is the history one big PNG image?

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" (2020)
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For me at least the logbook history is pretty useless. Since I can not delete obsolete devices (another topic), the huge amount of entities that I currently have, plus the fact that the history site is just a PNG image, makes it useless for me. Searching on the page doesn’t work since there is no text. I can not filter devices and I can not sort the devices.

Overall the logbook page gets 1/5 from me. Overall project is still 5/5 :joy:

Ideally the logbook history page would have:

  • individual images for each entity
  • option to (permanently) filter entities
  • option to sort

I think these would be good first steps.

Edit: I’m an idiot. I meant the history, not the logbook.

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It’s text, not an image.

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I’m confused. The logbook isn’t a PNG and you can filter on entities, start and end dates. Granted, there is no sorting, but the default sorting by date seems logical enough to me.

image
image1384×951 92.4 KB

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You can also permanently filter entities/domains: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/logbook/

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Well, do I feel like the village idiot now :joy:

I was actually talking about the history, not the loogbook! I’m sorry guys, I’ll edit OP.

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6

LMAO… Ok, yeah, MUCH better.

Personally, I don’t ever touch the History page, and if I do need to look up the history of an entity, I’ll either query the database or use NodeRed to pull a report.

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That’s what I do as well and I’ll most likely continue to do so, just because it is easier for me to query. That doesn’t mean that everybody is able to do that though. If it is enable by default (which I think it should), then the usability should improve a bit.

Just my 2 cents.

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Not trying to steal the thread, but how do you do those 2 things? Query the database? And do you have an example nodered flow I can see?

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Querying the DB is easy (and how I do it through NodeRed) by having the recorder output to a MySQL server.

You could do it using the internal sqlite3 db as well (home-assistant.db in your config directory). I’ll grab my flow and post it when I get home.

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Will there be a reply on this? Why IS it a PNG image? What is the purpose? How are we supposed to find the history of one item if we can’t search for text?

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If you look at the source code of the generated page, it is not a PNG image. The bars and graphs are script-generated.

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I think they are?

Those bar charts, AND the text alongside them, are drawn using canvas and a data URL. By default that would be a PNG.

The main issue is that the text alongside each bar chart is an image. What is the point of that?