Review before submitting a new issue or feature request

Before submitting an issue, please check these frequent questions and known limitations

• Holidays integration and configuration for manually including and excluding dates was removed in version 4.4 and replaced by the ability to customize the calculated schedule by calling services from automation triggered from the garbage_collection entity during its update. Related to that, I also released a Holidays integration (that is used by the blueprints), that is much more powerful and easier to use than when this was part of this integration. The reason for this change was, that I got an exponentially growing list of feature requests for different custom scenarios for handling exceptions, and it was not possible to hard-code them in the integration itself. The configuration was getting too "heavy" and the integration was already fragile. And there already are much more different blueprints available than what you could configure before 4.4 (and you can even create your own custom automation, so there is really no limit). More on that in the Release notes. The list of available blueprints and the instructions are included in the documentation.

• Blueprints: The Blueprints create automations, that are triggered by the event garbage_collection_loaded from entities configured for manual_update. To use them, make sure the entity is configured for manual update. The event includes data that is used by the automation. So these automation can only be triggered by the event! Calling them other ways will not work! The update happens when Home Assistant starts, once a day after midnight, and when the integration configuration changes. So to manually trigger the update (e.g. when configuring a new automation), you can open the Integration Configuration and click through the two screens. This will trigger the update (give it few seconds for the automation to run).

• The next_date attribute is not a text. It is a datetime value. The way it is displayed is controlled by HA, and it is consistent with other datetime attributes, such as last_updated. But because it is a value, you can show it in screen in whatever format you want. You can either use some custom Lovelace cards. Or format the value in whatever way you want using templates. For example, the next_date of entity sensor.general_waste might show a datetime value 2022-04-15 00:00:00+02:00. Using a template {{ as_timestamp(state_attr('sensor.general_waste','next_date')) | timestamp_custom('%a, %d %b %Y') }} it will show as Fri, 15 Apr 2022. Yes, it is a bit advanced, but if you are digging into entity attributes, I suppose you are on that level (and if not, then just don't do it).

• The integration is a backend component, that updates the device state. This means that all users see the same device state, and the updates happen even if there are no users logged in. In contrast, the way you display the sensor on the screen (Lovelace) depends on the user. For example, each user might have a different language configured, and you might therefore present the state in different formats.

• Translations: The states are in all lowercase letters (and are in English), the English translation typically has the first letter capital. For example, the entity might have the actual state today (to be used in automations), if you configured English as your language, on your screen, it will show as Today (the English translation). But if you chose Spanish for example, it will show as Hoy. This is how it works, please do not ask me to make the state to have first letter capital.

• The custom cards can do the translations on their own (e.g. the custom:garbage-collection-card). In this case, please open the issue on the website of this custom card.

• The easiest way to recognize a bug in this integration from a problem with your front end config is to

1. go to Developer Tools and click on tab States
2. under Current entities, type the name of your sensor in the filter
3. You can see the actual sensor state (not translated) in the column State
4. click to the (i) icon before the entity name to check the sensor state translated by this integration (top right corner) and attributes. If you refer to the sensor state, always include a screenshot from this card please. Thank you!

• The picture-entity Lovelace card in the example in README needs the sensor state to be either 0, 1 or 2. So if you configure the integration to verbose_state, it won't work (as the state will include the date, not number 0, 2 or 3)

• Translation of the month or weekday names in the state is not possible, unfortunately. Theoretically, it could work, but currently, the Jinja 2 implementation used by Home Assistant does not support locales. There is nothing I can do about that.

• You can create multiple entities by just adding new Garbage Connection integration entries. It will group all devices under a single Garbage Collection panel. You can add as many entries as you want, there is no limitation.

• If you want to delete the integration, please first remove the configured sensors (if you have configured them from in Configuration/Integration)

• You have to restart HA after installing are removing the integration.

Please respect the following rules:

1. Before creating a new issue, search the issues if a similar issue did not exist.
2. If you are a developer, consider creating a pull request with your suggested change. This is especially the case for translations. There are 2 files for each language - one translates the sensor values, the other the web-based configuration.
3. Please use the device DOWNLOAD DIAGNOSTICS to include the configuration detail with the ticket. Without this, I will not be able to troubleshoot it. For bugs, please enable debug log level detail for the integration and include the log. It will help a lot to know what is going on. Thanks.