Keep old values instead of setting all to unavailable

[green-dragon-pixel]

First I want to say thanks a lot for the hard work!

I'm trying to use a vehicle card with the data delivered by your extension. Unfortunatelly the car goes into sleep mode to protect it's battery. I'm always frustrated when all the values turn from a valid informatio to "Unavailable" as the last usefull information is overwritten.

Describe the solution you'd like

1. For the UI it would be great if the values are updated as we get new valid information and skip the Unavailable.
2. A new sensor could be added showing that the connection status "Unavailable" or "Connected"
3. In cases that the data is Unavailable, a button can be offered to wake the car up and force update the values.

Describe alternatives you've considered
The only other solution that went through my mind was to setup for every sensor a helper that ignores the Unavailable states. This is a lot of work.

Additional context
I have a Skoda Octavia from 2018.
Since I had to change the pull time to 180 minutes to keep the integration from being blocked, I have unfortunately, for the next 3 hours no valid data. This happens too often as the myskoda app awakes the car only 2-3 times a day.

Please let me know how you see this and maybe have another ideas how to elegantly solve this issue. I'm currently experimenting with two vehicle cards: Ultra Vehicle Card (https://ultravehiclecard.com) and Vehicle Status Card (https://github.com/ngocjohn/vehicle-status-card).

All the best! Bogdan

[WebSpider]

This is an interesting case. As far as we know, the car only goes into battery protection after you have issued commands that alter the configuration of the car. Are you doing this on a regular basis?

Do you have logs available showing what the API is responding when battery protection kicks in, so we can recognise this is the case?

[dvx76]

Generally speaking, for HA integrations, the expected behavior is that entities will become Unavailable when there is a failure to retrieve the relevant data. That is the correct state. The actual value may still be the last value, but it is unknown.

This is a recurring topic in many HA forums, e.g. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/sensor-display-last-known-value-instead-of-unavailable/200081

If there are entities for which you really want to display the last known state the typically recommended approach is to create a corresponding template entity which mirrors the source entity but only updates if the state is available.

[WebSpider]

Since this is expected behaviour, we will not be changing integration to suit this. If you have any more data relating to the behaviour of your Octiavia, please open a seperate issue so we can troubleshoot that.