WTH: Why no Blueprints or templating for Sensors

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

If you create a complicated sensor template and want to reuse it, you have to cut-n-paste the whole thing and modify a few variables. It could be so much cleaner if it was possible to create either a blueprint for sensors. Alternatively enabling the standard Jinja templating features: include or import.

Sensor blueprints would make sharing and installing complicated sensors easier, especially for users not willing or able to edit jinja and/or YAML.

2

So I mean you can reuse if you switch to a trigger template entities since then you can use trigger variables combined with yaml anchors. For example I have a set of sensors like this:

template:
- trigger:
    - platform: state
      variables: &basement-trigger-variables
        presence_entities: &basement-presence-entities
          - binary_sensor.basement_camera_person_alert
      entity_id: *basement-presence-entities
      to:
  binary_sensor:
    name: Person detected basement
    unique_id: c38933d24a2a478cab11d0e1ae3279fe_detector_basement
    device_class: occupancy
    state: &detector-state >-
      {{ expand(presence_entities | default([])) | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on
') | list | count > 0
        or is_state('binary_sensor.awake_at_home', 'on') and
        expand(awake_presence_entities | default([])) | selectattr('state', 'eq'
, 'on') | list | count > 0
      }}
    attributes: &detector-attributes
      entity_id: >-
        {{ presence_entities | default([]) +
          (awake_presence_entities | default([]) if is_state('binary_sensor.awak
e_at_home', 'on') else []) }}
- trigger:
    - platform: state
      variables: &bedroom-trigger-variables
        presence_entities: &bedroom-presence-entities
          - binary_sensor.bedroom_monitor_in_use
          - binary_sensor.bedroom_motion_sensor_occupancy
          - binary_sensor.bedroom_tv_in_use
        awake_presence_entities: &bedroom-awake-presence-entities
          - switch.bedroom_closet_light
      entity_id: *bedroom-presence-entities
      to:
    - platform: state
      variables: *bedroom-trigger-variables
      entity_id: *bedroom-awake-presence-entities
      to:
    - platform: state
      variables: *bedroom-trigger-variables
      entity_id: binary_sensor.awake_at_home
      to:
  binary_sensor:
    name: Person detected bedroom
    unique_id: 7585346108f14c3194e94a3396c1d96b_detector_bedroom
    device_class: occupancy
    state: *detector-state
    attributes: *detector-attributes

... Other rooms

But it would be nice if this was easier.

Also I definitely wish you could put template sensors in blueprints. Or better yet, blueprint packages.

3

Yes, I think a blueprint package, where you can add more than just automations would be really cool. Adding template sensors, scenes and or scripts would make sharing of more complex automated stuff easier.

4

They added jinja2 macros for templates in the 2023.4 release. Woo Hoo!

5

Yes the macros are really handy. It helps to make my code cleaner. However we still cannot share this in a blueprint. Therefore some kind of blueprint package would be nice to have, a way to share not only automations but also macros and template sensors for example