Grant dashboard access to new devices as created

Hello,

I request the following feature:

When new devices are created, by whatever means, I would like to have my dashboards be automatically granted access to them.

This would save me countless minutes (hours?) of annoying-to-me busywork that places unnecessary (to me) obstacles in my creative flow as I am developing my dashboards. And lots of mouse miles. And keep me from cursing so much.

I appreciate your consideration.

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Welcome to the Hubitat forums!

This has been requested in the past. In fact, it used to be that way (sorta) you could select all devices be available on a dashboard with one checkmark. It was changed a while back to make you pick and choose items on purpose.

There are many good reasons to not do what I believe you are requesting. The most important being that the hub would have to process, load, and render every device, even if it wasn't displayed, every time you accessed a dashboard. That can (and does) slow the hub down especially when you get into the hundreds of devices. The other reason is that there simply is no need to allow dashboards to access certain devices or device types. Most people really don't want every virtual device, every scene, every weather container, every everything on a dashboard, me included.

And please tell me that you didn't put 200 things all on one dashboard. :open_mouth: Smaller is better here, dashboards work best. render the fastest, and are the least disruptive to the hub when you keep things down to (just to pick a number) maybe like 25 or so items per dashboard.

All that being said, it would be nice if when you added a new device it would prompt you to select (or not) a dashboard where to place this device and not have to go back into the settings for the dashboard app.

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Or tie the dashboards to a room. Granted this would then be open to the same issues as "all devices" in the past, so there would need to be some controls. So may get a little messy to implement or work with...

Thank you for the feedback.

I think the facts you have amplified are intuitive to most, and no, I don't aspire to overloading my dashboards with hundreds (or even dozens) of devices each.

However, the way it works now actually pushes against the goal of keeping dashboards svelte and unencumbered, at least in my personal scenario and workflow.

If I may... consider me developing my dashboards. An inspiration strikes, and I need to go create. a new device (e.g., a dummy, a counter, a scene or group, a Hubigraph device, etc., this happens a lot as I'm developing dashboards ) So I make the device, head back to the dashboard I was working on,, remember ++foreheadsmack++ oh gotta grant the permission first .... so Apps..scroll through textual list of app names, like twisty passages, all alike... find...Hubitat Dashboards .... select my dashboard from another twisty passages list..... then ++foreheadsmack++ wow, that is a REALLY long unfiltered unsortable unsearchable textual textbox list of device names... all alike! as the memory of why I'm here in the first place starts to fade.... aha, checkbox toggle all on -- that should about do it... scroll down , update, done, NOW back to my dashboard where there once was an inspiration, if I can remember what it was....

So pretty much all my dashboards have access to all devices anyway.

I understand trying to incent good computing habits but at least for me this has the opposite effect.

You mentioned the idea of a prompt, which I think has merit and may hit the sweet spot. It's not clear to me if this forum is a means of submitting feature requests to the Hubitat product development people or if this is more along the lines of a peer support forum. Is there something else I should do to place my request before those in charge of the roadmap?

Thanks for listening.

The HE Gods are active in this forum so, if they deem it worthy, they tend to act on it, but may not indicate this as keenly for enhancements as they do for bug fixes... I think voicing your opinion can help to garner support from other Community members, and, potentially the Gods will listen :-). If nothing else, it encourages discussion about possible solutions you may not have considered...

In terms of your specific request, I think you raise a good point about UX (User eXperience) in general, ideally I would also like to see the ability to action changes with as few "jumps" as is necessary. So nominating a Room within the Device Edit / Create page makes sense, why not the Dashboards a device may be linked to in the same page...?

I know this is not exactly the same request, but thought I'd throw in my own perspective....

Simon

Oh yes, a thousand times yes! :sweat_smile:

This would be good too, and could be on the "add device" popup, next to where you type in the name for the device, right after including it.

Perhaps bring back this checkmark, but with a conditional requirement, that it will stop auto-including devices to a dashboard once a certain number of them on there has been reached? This would be a good hybrid approach. And I really like the idea of auto-including devices on a dashboard -- I think about this every-single-time I go through that process that @jbond so hilariously described.

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Duck everyone! A thought just occurred to me!

Surely there's a difference between, one one hand, adding a newly created device to a dashboard (i.e., placing a device proxy tile onto the dashboard display) and, on the other hand, allowing access from a dashboard to the new device (i.e.,, permitting its proxy tile to be added, or as the UI states "This does not automatically add the devices to the dashboard, just makes them available to be added.")

Purely from intuition, it would seem that the "adding" case might demand more limited system resources than the "allowing access" case. So to be clear, what I'm asking for is automatically "allowing access" to new devices. Would this notably increase demand on resources? Those intimate with the system architecture would know, and I'm not about to second-guess them. No doubt they will weigh this question when deciding if my request goes on the roadmap or not.

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Playing devil's advocate:

  1. If you have 20 Dashboards, which of them are you wanting to automatically add access to? Aren't you right back to a list?
  2. If you have Dashboards that you give to others to use, are you really going to want to grant access to these other people to all of the devices you add?

This is not a one size fits all circumstance. I for one, speaking personally, would hate to have all or even any of the devices I create added to any of my Dashboards. They are setup just the way I want them, and the last thing I want is for the hub to mess with them behind my back.

But, choice is good. However, at some point, adding more choices around this topic itself becomes a source of confusion, especially for new users. There is a principle at stake worth remembering: "Your use case is not my use case."

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This is a great place to make suggestions and feature requests. It's as close to a "suggestion box" as you can get....

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Yeah, I did quite quickly regret the tone and of my post last, my apologies to you Bruce and the HE team. You are all open to suggestions and do engage actively with the community on both enhancement suggestions and addressing bugs, my comment was not accurate. The engagement with all the team is one of the features of this platform.

Simon

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That's a great point, and I hadn't realized until I read it that this is what I had envisioned. I don't actually want all devices on my dashboards. I just want to eliminate the tedious (and surprisingly frustrating) steps needed to grant access so that I can then add the devices to a dashboard, without having to manually grant the access needed to do this. It's the access control that is the sticking point.

Here's a thought. What if there were an "access window", where devices could be added, sans manual granting of access, to any dashboard, within a certain timeframe of the device having been created. This would streamline the create-new-device, add-device-to-dashboard part of the process, and would also keep older devices from being added. And perhaps the dashboards wouldn't specifically need to know about any given new device and their related access rights -- not until the user clicks on the Add button on the dashboard itself, where the device creation time could be checked, and given a pass if it's new enough.

You do realize that you are 3 clicks away from adding access to every device to a Dashboard? Toggle All On/Off does that....

May not be worth the effort by the programmers, but I always though it would be convenient to have a few check boxes to add...all switches, motion devices, temp sensors, d/w sensors, etc.

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Sure, this could be done -- at the expense of a more involved UI. Starts being a bit like RM, with selectors to choose a selector. We will be spending some time looking at Dashboard for improvements. So these discussions are valuable to us.

Biggest problem is that the hub can't read your mind....

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What I have been thinking would make user experience easier would be that you could grant access to all devices for a dashboard, then after creating it to your satisfaction, have an option to "ungrant access to all unused" so it would automatically untick all devices that you had not referenced in your dashboard. In any future edits you could once more choose "grant all" followed by "ungrant unused" when finished editing.

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AFAIK that is not the case.

Whether or not you add the device tile on the dashboard, the dashboard must subscribe to all the device events. That’s what @neonturbo was describing above.

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So I guess my feature request was.... declined? rejected? Drowned? A little frustrating but not unexpected.

None of the above?

They basically haven't done any dashboard changes or improvements since you posted. So I don't think this was ignored or rejected.

They have said many times and places on this forum that they are aware of needed changes and improvements for dashboard (among other things), but for various reasons haven't done so.

Hubitat doesn't publish timelines, nor do they promise to do things that may (or may not) happen. Only when things are (or are nearly) done do they release that information. Bruce is very good about updating old posts and saying "that will be in the next release". So as to when to expect changes, that is unknown to users. It could be tomorrow, next month, or never.

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I understand that's how it currently works, but WHY? :thinking:
Why does it need to subscribe to devices that its not displaying on the dashboard?
Why can't the Dashboard only subscribe to the devices tiles that were added?

What is the use case for subscribing to a device that the dashboard is not displaying?

(Over-simplification, but close enough to illustrate.) There are 2 pieces to a dashboard, a backend app which listens for events and let's you add/remove devices, and a front end that lets you customize and serves up the HTML. Since it is two pieces, you need to be able to add to the backend before actually implementing a tile to display/interact. This separation allows for the dashboard to display information without exposing the devices directly, which allows it to be cloud accessible.

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