Ability to specify defaults for UI-created input Helpers

[seraphx2]

Pretty much self-explanatory. Dropdowns and Toggles cannot have a default value set. That can be very important to have defined on restart of a HA. Weird this wasn't included in the first place.

[Mariusthvdb]

Same goes for initial which is really necessary for some toggles (booleans). Unless that’s what you mean ofc

[seraphx2]

correct. I meant for that field.

[Mariusthvdb]

had written my own discussion here #12944 (comment) but it was marked duplicate if yours ;-)

hope it will attract some attention other than administrative....

[lollo78]

OMG!
After more than a year the "initial" option is not added to the UI.
This is essential in some scenarios!

Please devs, add it for our brain sanity. Thanks

[Mariusthvdb]

wonder if we can set that via customize:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    input_boolean.just_started:
      initial: on

like we did when this was still in yaml:

input_boolean:

  just_started:
    name: Just started
    initial: on

nope, doesn't work

[karwosts]

Out of curiousity, can you elaborate some of the situations where this is useful? I'm not sure why it was left out but maybe someone didn't think it provided for much. Was curious about the use case.

[Mariusthvdb]

Suppose the example above is exemplary.

set a Boolean always true on start.

After some time automate to turn off.
Et voila you always have an entity to template and use in any other logic for HA being just started or not.

Checking the code there still is the ‘initial’ state but we can no longer set it in the Ui.

Which would be the sole and silly reason for it to keep in Yaml.

currently I solve this by adding another automation run on startup itself to turn off the Boolean …..

[lollo78]

Out of curiousity, can you elaborate some of the situations where this is useful? I'm not sure why it was left out but maybe someone didn't think it provided for much. Was curious about the use case.

For example: I have two views for my motorized ipcam (A and B) and I want that the initial view is A. So, when I power on the camera it will set automatically on A also if the last used was B.

[danielbrunt57]

Please add this option to the frontend for input_boolean (toggle):

☑ Initial value: ⦿ on 〇 off

Out of curiousity, can you elaborate some of the situations where this is useful? I'm not sure why it was left out but maybe someone didn't think it provided for much. Was curious about the use case.

I've just had to create an input boolean via yaml as I want the initial state to always be off.
I'm using it to indicate whether a custom component's notify services have been loaded, which initially is No when HA starts therefore restore_state is totally inappropriate if HA was shut down with the boolean set to On. The integration turns the boolean on when the services have registered. That in turn can be used to by automations/scripts to selectively call the notify service if the boolean is on or skip the non-existent service call. Without that check, the automations/scripts proceed to execute the call to the non-existent service and the rest of the sequence then fails to execute due to HA's error that the service does not exist, which is not caught or overridden by the continue_on_error flag.

[ukmgranger]

I agree that this is important! I would like the reassurance of knowing that some of my input_booleans are on / off at startup.
Use case - I have a boolean that turns off / on automatic locking of my front door after 1 min. It can be useful to turn off the automatic locking (guests etc), but on the whole I want this to be off by default, and certainly when I reboot.