RFC: First-class entity like input_select about architecture

[awarecan]

How about scene?

[jantman]

I'm not clear on how scene would really help here...

1. My proposal is for something new built in to the hass core, not necessarily for end-user use. Right now there's ZoneMinder, as well as a lot of TV and media integrations (i.e. video and audio inputs, playlists, etc.) that have a logical action of "select one and only one item from a list" and "this list currently has one and only one active item" but there's no way to handle this natively in the component, because there's no Entity that works that way.
2. In terms of ZoneMinder specifically, I don't want to control cameras individually from hass. I already have the run states defined in ZM where I normally set them, I just want a way to be able to control them from hass.

Sometime this week I'm going to work up a PR to expose ZoneMinder run states as a service, which will at least let users handle this through automations... but the UI side will still be missing.

[MartinHjelmare]

This proposal has come up many times and the answer has always been that we shouldn't implement a "multi-valued switch" but tailor each component after a specific device, eg vacuum component for robot vacuum cleaners.

@balloob should we close?

[MartinHjelmare]

Btw, the zoneminder component has implemented services to cater for the run states selection.

[balloob]

Yeah let's close. A lot of these things are really frontend concerns and should be solved there.