Edit Triggers of Template Sensor in UI

[luca-vogels]

Describe the feature

Custom created Template Sensors (Settings > Devices & Services > Helpers) are executed every minute and when the referenced entities change. When editing the Template of the sensor, this can be seen in the preview section at the end of the editor UI.

It would be nice if the UI would provide options to remove those default triggers and add custom triggers.

In addition, there could be an option added that allows defining a "Triggerable Template" besides the already existing "Availability Template". Only if it evaluates to a truthy value the triggers are allowed to update the sensor, otherwise the sensor returns the latest known value.

Use cases

A sensor that uses the hourly temperature forecast of today and computes the minimum temperature.
With the current implementation, the sensor updates every minute, and already passed hours no longer get considered for the computation because the forecast only returns future values. Therefore, the output temperature does not stay constant throughout the day.
If I could edit the triggers in the UI, I could remove the default ones and instead define a time range trigger that only allows updates in the first hour of the day.

Current workarounds

The triggers can be controlled by creating the sensor in the YAML, but then the sensor is not editable throughout the UI.
For the "Triggerable Template" feature, I have no workaround figured out yet.

Anything else?

No response

[Petro31]

Unfortunately, the core team is against this change. In the future, when template blueprints can be imported through the UI, you will be able to use trigger based template entities in the UI through blueprints. I have been working towards this goal over the past year.

[luca-vogels]

Would be interesting to know why they are against it 🤔 maybe they are up to something.

[Petro31]

because it would be too complicated for the small pop up window that integrations use for setup