example-cfg-attr-as-list.md

Examples - Attribute as List (attr_as_list)

I regulary have the need to transport, store and visualize non-trivial data to the frontend, provided by appdaemon or other sources not represented within regular entities.

I use the variable component to create initially empty entities. These can be filled with content using theset_variable() service.

To keep data ordered, passing a full (py-)list to the service, leads to proper jsonification. Using the attr_to_list content matcher within columns will expand this list to a row for each item:

### warning: 
###   this snippet will not work without 3rd party components
###   and configurations!

type: custom:flex-table-card 
title: Fancy tabular data

# this matches just the *variable component* entitiy
entities:
  include: variable.muell_tracker

# the columns are now similar, just with one match leading
# to severall lines being filled:
columns:
  - name: Date
    attr_as_list: due_dates
  - name: Description
    attr_as_list: descriptions

A recuring pattern is a list of dicts (e.g., json objects). Using attr_as_list together with modify, one can select specifc json members, which then leads to multiple columns with the same attr_as_list param, just modify differs. The latter might be unwanted if combined with sort_by, multiple columns would match thus sort_by will simply not deliver expected behavior. Therefore a column can additionally also have the id param which serves as the unique (and overruling) identifier for any column reference. The following example show-cases these concepts:

### warning: 
###   this snippet will not work without 3rd party components
###   and configurations!

type: custom:flex-table-card 
title: List of json data nicely visualized

# the list shall be sorted by 'rating', a json member
sort_by: rating-

entities:
  # matching entity contains a list of json objects (dicts)
  include: sensor.items_with_details   

columns:
  - name: Name
    attr_as_list: details
    modify: x.name

  - name: Description
    attr_as_list: details
    modify: x.desc

  - name: Price
    attr_as_list: details
    modify: x.price

  - name: Rating
    attr_as_list: details
    # let's assume rating is just calculated from other members
    modify: 'x.price * x.available_pieces'
    # without adding `id` here the sorting would be not as expected 
    id: rating

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