My Persistent Notifications

A custom sensor for Home Assistant that counts the number of active persistent notifications, with optional filtering based on notification ID prefixes.

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🔍 Purpose

This integration provides a simple sensor that:

• Shows the total number of active persistent notifications as the sensor state.
• Exposes all active notifications as a JSON list in the notifications attribute.
• Optionally adds extra attributes for counts per ID prefix, configured via YAML.

Useful for organizing and reacting to notifications from specific sources like "cat", "doorbell", "update", etc.

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✅ Example Functionality

Imagine you have 5 active notifications:

ID	Message
cat1	Feed Felix the cat
doorbell1	Someone rang the bell
cat2	Felix has entered the house
cat3	Felix has left the house
updates	Some message

With the following configuration:

sensor:
  - platform: my_persistent_notifications
    filters:
      - cat
      - doorbell

The sensor will output:

sensor.active_persistent_notifications:
  state: 5
  attributes:
    cat: 3
    doorbell: 1
    notifications:
      - id: cat1
        title: ...
        message: ...
      - ...

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⚙️ Installation

1. 📁 Place the component inside your custom_components directory:

config/
└── custom_components/
    └── my_persistent_notifications/
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── sensor.py
        ├── manifest.json
        └── const.py (optional, currently unused)

2. 📄 Add to your configuration.yaml:

sensor:
  - platform: my_persistent_notifications
    filters:
      - cat
      - doorbell

• filters is optional. Leave it out if you don’t need filtered counts.
• Notification IDs are set using the notification_id parameter in automations or scripts.

3. 🔁 Restart Home Assistant.

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📊 Sensor Output

Property	Description
state	Total number of active persistent notifications
notifications	A list of all active notifications (in JSON format)
cat, doorbell (etc.)	Number of notifications with IDs starting with that prefix

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🧪 Tips

• You can create a notification with a specific ID in automations or scripts like this:

service: persistent_notification.create
data:
  message: The cat wants food
  title: Cat Alert
  notification_id: cat3

• Use Developer Tools → States to inspect sensor output.
• Combine with automations for powerful notification-aware workflows.

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📎 License

Free to use and modify. This is a community-driven project. 😄