Helper group loses attribute entity_id and its members in case these are all unavailable

[Mariusthvdb]

The problem

previously raised in https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/77511 but closed as stale without resolution

as title: helper group entities that contain entities that are all unavailable (think light group with incidental lights not connected to power), lose their entity_id attribute, and the contained entity_ids because of that

even though the config_entries show the lights are configured:

"options": {
          "group_type": "light",
          "name": "Kerststerren",
          "entities": [
            "light.ster_links",
            "light.ster_rechts"
          ],
          "hide_members": false

and the helper flow also shows the lights:

we can not in any other way find these unavailable members via templating, because we can not expand on that now also unavailable group. use case: find any light that is not a member of a light group

{% set groepen = states.light
|selectattr('attributes.entity_id','defined')
| map(attribute='entity_id')
|list %}

{% set leden = groepen| expand | map(attribute='entity_id')| list %}

{{ states.light
    | map(attribute='entity_id')
    | reject('in', groepen +leden)
    | list}}

returns the grouped, but unavailable entity_id's

What version of Home Assistant Core has the issue?

2024.8.1

What was the last working version of Home Assistant Core?

No response

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

Integration causing the issue

group

Link to integration documentation on our website

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/group

Diagnostics information

No response

Example YAML snippet

{% set groepen = states.light
|selectattr('attributes.entity_id','defined')
| map(attribute='entity_id')
|list %}

{% set leden = groepen| expand | map(attribute='entity_id')| list %}

{{ states.light
    | map(attribute='entity_id')
    | reject('in', groepen +leden)
    | list}}

Anything in the logs that might be useful for us?

No response

Additional information

using the old style grouped as an experiment:

group:
  test_kerstverlichting:
    name: Test kerstverlichting
    entities:
      - light.ster_links
      - light.ster_rechts

does contain the attribute and the member entity_id's

and allows to iterate these:

[home-assistant[bot]]

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[mekaneck]

My $0.02 is the correct behavior should be that the group state goes to unknown when all members are unavailable. The group entity itself should continue to be available because it is well defined. It's merely that its state cannot be determined because the members are all unavailable, and therefore the state of unknown is more appropriate.

Further, if the solution instead was to retain the attributes on the group entity while has an unavailable status, it would be behavior that is not consistent with any other entity in HA.

[loocd]

Same issue here. In my application I am trying to expand groups to create light cards automatically. I aim to automatically display all my light entities, but want different cards for single lights and for grouped lights.

see example: dummy single light on top, dummy grouped lights on bottom.

to do this, I need to:

• exclude light groups from the list of entities of the top card by checking their entity_id attribute. This is not possible if the attribute gets removed in case of unavailable lights
• exclude individual lights from the top card (otherwise I have the light twice - once as a single light, once as a group light) by expanding all groups and removing the resulting lights from the list of cards. This is not possible if the groups can't be expanded anymore

my expected behaviour would be to retain full group functionality - i.e. keeps entity_id attribute even if lights become unavailable. The group is still valid and should be displayed as such, just the value is not known due to no lights being available.

[issue-triage-workflows[bot]]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue recently. Due to the high number of incoming GitHub notifications, we have to clean some of the old issues, as many of them have already been resolved with the latest updates. Please make sure to update to the latest Home Assistant version and check if that solves the issue. Let us know if that works for you by adding a comment 👍 This issue has now been marked as stale and will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[Mariusthvdb]

Keep