Home Assistant sidebar

[kubawolanin]

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I've made an Items explorer for openhab-vscode extension.

This PR implements a sidebar with the following Tree Views:

• Entities - to quickly copy their IDs, visit log book and history chart for them. Copying their ID handles multiselection as well, so this could potentially be a gateway to dynamically create snippets for groups etc. This view is also filterable - simply start typing after clicking on any row. Read more here
• Reload - to reload parts of Home Assistant right from the sidebar. These commands were already implemented and I've simply found them a place on the UI.
• Help And Feedback - a quick access to the docs, community forum as well as GitHub issues to this extension.

Demo

Entities:

Create a group:

TODO:

• Stop relying on language server's haConnection / websocket subscription and make a REST call to get /states. This will make things a lot faster, since right now the Entities sidebar waits for LanguageServer to finish loading.
• Fix race condition coming from above - fetchEntities only when the view is constructed, then let the user manually refresh
• After that, revisit fetchEntities & fetch_entities_completed cycle - maybe remove it altogether
• Implement a drag & drop for selected entities into the editor - Add drag and drop for contributed tree views microsoft/vscode#32592 is a proposed API that will allow that (future)
• Display a badge for entities count when badges on custom activities added to activity bar by extensions microsoft/vscode#62783 is implemented (future)
• Group/ungroup entities by domain - Reference in GistPad repo
• Sort entities command

I know it's a lot to grasp, but it'll be quite a useful feature once it's done 🙌🏻

Cheers! 🍻

[kubawolanin]

add other commands there?

[kubawolanin]

Don't think it's needed anymore

[kubawolanin]

Need a clever way to detect if we're using process.env.HASS_SERVER and process.env.HASS_TOKEN that's outside language server.

[kubawolanin]

Maybe a simple output log will suffice

[frenck]

Stop relying on language server's haConnection / websocket subscription and make a REST call to get /states. This will make things a lot faster, since right now the Entities sidebar waits for LanguageServer to finish loading.

We should not be using the REST endpoint. If anything, we should get rid of all rest. The REST endpoint isn't really kept up to date or maintained. All of HA is built on top of the WebSockets nowadays.

[kubawolanin]

We should not be using the REST endpoint. If anything, we should get rid of all rest. The REST endpoint isn't really kept up to date or maintained.

Interesting, haven't seen it mentioned in REST API docs and thought it can be used. Thanks for the heads up.

[frenck]

Your latest addition for groups, will actually create old-style (original for the old, removed states-UI) groups.

These groups are actually discouraged. As of Home Assistant 2022.2, the groups.yaml isn't even created anymore (on new installs).

The use of platform-specific groups is preferred and function a lot better.

[kubawolanin]

These groups are actually discouraged

Could you point me where exactly are they discouraged?
They're still supported though, aren't they? I'm sure someone will find this useful anyways.

The use of platform-specific groups

Do you mean cover.group and light.group?

I could write a logic that iterates over domains of selected entities, and if they're all the same, the result snippet would be platform-specific...

[frenck]

Could you point me where exactly are they discouraged?

We are removing them in multiple places, e.g., the groups.yaml is no more as of this release.

As said, the generic groups are leftover from the old UI interface. In most cases, specific groups should be used.

For example, if you want to bundle lights, you should use light groups, not groups.

The old groups have quite a few issues and often do not provide the expected behavior.

Considering that, I would not recommend adding the creation of old-fashioned groups like this.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.