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localthings/docs/investigations/offline-setup.md
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Marc Billow 9d3782a29a Harden the snapshot path against three review findings
Widen async_rehydrate's guard to cover the identity and Subdevice rebuild,
not just the replay. A stored row missing a field the current dataclass
declares raised KeyError straight out of async_setup_entry, which only
handles ConfigEntryNotReady -- so the entry landed in SETUP_ERROR, which HA
never retries, with its DTLS session left open on the fixed source port the
next attempt binds. It now fails the same way an unreachable device does.

Write the snapshot immediately instead of through async_delay_save. A
deferred write outlives whatever queued it: removing an entry inside the
delay window deleted the file and then had it recreated, orphaned, when the
timer fired; and a reload scheduled by _reconcile_rehydrated read the
pre-reload snapshot back off disk, so a device going quiet again mid-reload
rehydrated the stale set and reconciled a second time. Banking it before the
reconcile fixes the ordering. Failures are logged rather than raised -- a
board reporting something the JSON encoder rejects must not break polling.
2026-08-15 20:32:46 +00:00

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Markdown

# Loading a config entry while the appliance is offline
Issue #295 asks for faster recovery when a powered-off appliance comes back,
instead of waiting out HA's `ConfigEntryNotReady` backoff. PR #303 tried to
get there by catching the first-refresh failure in `async_setup_entry` and
loading the entry anyway.
That doesn't work here, and the reason is worth writing down: this
integration has no static entity list. Every entity comes from discovery,
and discovery only happens inside a successful poll.
(The issue's "up to 15 minutes" is out of date, incidentally. Current HA
retries on `2 ** min(tries, 4) * 5` seconds — capped at 80s, not 900. The
backoff was never the worst part; a device card reading "Retrying setup" with
no entities behind it is.)
## What PR #303 produces today
Measured on the PR's branch — set up with `_poll_once` raising, then advance
the clock four summary intervals:
| | |
| --- | --- |
| entry state | `LOADED` |
| `coordinator.bound` | 0 |
| entities in the state machine | 0 |
| registry entries | 1 (the disabled connection-mode sensor) |
| coordinator listeners | 0 |
| `_unsub_refresh` | `None` |
| poll attempts over the next 4 intervals | **0** |
The entry loads and then never polls again. `DataUpdateCoordinator._async_refresh`
reschedules only `if not auth_failed and self._listeners and not
self.hass.is_stopping`; with no bound entities the only unconditional entity
is `LocalThingsConnectionModeSensor`, which is
`entity_registry_enabled_default = False` and so never added and never
subscribes. Nothing reloads the entry either. The device comes back online to
an entry that is permanently empty until a manual reload — strictly worse
than the backoff it replaces, which did recover on its own within 15 minutes.
## Why entities can't just be created offline
Four independent gates, all of which need live device data:
1. `bound` is only ever assigned in `_run_discovery` (`coordinator.py:1081`),
which runs on a poll's `resources` dict.
2. All ten platforms enumerate `coordinator.bound` exactly once, at forward
time (`sensor.py:34` and siblings). Nothing adds entities later — the
invariant is already documented at `coordinator.py:1283-1286`.
3. `_is_included` (`entity.py:39`) returns False whenever `last_resources`
has no rep for the href. Even a fully reconstructed `bound` filters to
nothing while `StateCache` is empty.
4. `LocalThingsEntity` is a bare `CoordinatorEntity` with no `available`
override, no `RestoreEntity`, and no `Store` anywhere in the component. An
entity that did exist offline would be `unavailable` with no state.
The issue cites ESPHome, Shelly, LIFX and WLED as precedent for setup that
never fails. Those integrations can do it because each one has a *persisted
device description* to build entities from — ESPHome keeps its entity list in
`.storage`, Shelly caches device info. The pattern is portable; the mechanism
underneath it is the part PR #303 is missing.
## How the implemented version works
Three pieces, plus a gating rule.
### 1. A persisted discovery snapshot
After each successful first cycle, `_save_snapshot` banks exactly the
`resources` dict that cycle handed `_run_discovery`, along with the
pre-narrowing subdevice candidate list and the `DeviceIdentity` read from
`/oic/*`.
Storing the poll input rather than a rendered entity list is the decision
that keeps this honest. `BoundEntity` holds live
`Capability`/`SamsungEntityDescription` objects and isn't serializable, so
the alternative was a parallel format plus a re-resolution path — a second
implementation of discovery that could drift from the real one. Replaying the
input through `_run_discovery` means the same code, the same registry
resolution, and no second source of truth.
Three things ride along because `_run_discovery` reads them off `self`
rather than out of `resources`, and getting them wrong would silently resolve
a *different* registry offline than online — which reconciliation below would
then see as a real change and reload on every restart:
- `_identity.device_types` routes `resolve_registry`.
- `self.subdevices` is the candidate list `discover_partitioned` narrows;
replaying against the already-narrowed list finds no siblings at all.
- `_identity.manufacturer`/`model` feed `device_info`.
It lives in `.storage` (`Store`, keyed on entry_id) rather than on the config
entry: it's device state, not configuration, and runs to tens of kilobytes.
`async_remove_entry` deletes it with the entry.
The write is awaited, not `async_delay_save`d. A deferred write outlives
whatever queued it: it lands after `async_remove_entry` has deleted the file
and recreates it orphaned, and a reload scheduled by the reconcile below
would read the pre-reload snapshot back off disk. It runs once per entry
load, so there's nothing worth deferring. A write that fails is logged and
swallowed — a board reporting something the JSON encoder rejects must not
break polling.
### 2. Reconcile on reconnect
The snapshot is a claim about a device we haven't talked to yet. When the
first live poll lands, `_reconcile_rehydrated` compares the live entity set
against the rehydrated one — as `(subdevice key, _key(bound))` pairs, which
is the unique_id identity — and calls `async_schedule_reload` if they differ.
Gate 2 above is why this has to be a reload rather than an in-place fixup.
It's what makes the feature safe against a firmware update, a sibling
subdevice that starts answering, or a different appliance at the same IP.
### 3. Keep polling with no listeners
`async_setup_entry` holds one listener for the entry's lifetime:
```python
entry.async_on_unload(coordinator.async_add_listener(lambda: None))
```
Registered *before* the first refresh, so scheduling survives a refresh that
fails. This alone fixes the measured "never polls again" bug, and covers a
rehydrated set whose entities are all registry-disabled. Removing the last
listener unschedules the timer, and HA runs `async_on_unload` callbacks when
setup raises, so the setup-retry path doesn't leak a polling coordinator.
### Gating rule: only load offline when there's a snapshot
An entry that has never successfully polled has nothing to restore and keeps
raising `ConfigEntryNotReady`. This is what answers the objection in the PR
thread — with a snapshot we *do* have metadata to build a device from, and
without one HA's backoff is still the right behavior. It also leaves room for
the #168-style flows that need to interact with the device during setup: a
device that never completed setup still blocks.
It also means `async_remove_config_entry_device` is no longer reachable with
an empty `coordinator.subdevices`, so an offline load can't offer to delete a
real-but-unreachable subdevice.
### The coverage-gap Repair stays live-only
`_run_discovery(..., from_snapshot=True)` skips `_update_coverage_gap_issue`.
The Repair points the user at a diagnostics download, which is empty until
the appliance answers, and a device name that drifts between the snapshot and
the live poll would churn the issue for no reason.
Not a de-duplication measure — HA already handles that. `async_create_issue`
is keyed on `(domain, issue_id)`, `dataclasses.replace` in
`async_get_or_create` leaves `dismissed_version` alone, and the registry
reloads non-persistent issues with their dismissal intact, so one row per
entry survives restarts and an "Ignore" sticks.
## What this still won't do
Entities will be present and `unavailable` — not showing their last values.
Gate 4 means last-known values require either `RestoreEntity` per platform or
persisting `StateCache`, and both mean asserting state the integration cannot
verify: a washer unplugged for a week would read "Running". HA's convention
is that unreachable means unavailable, and the recorder keeps the history
either way, so long-term statistics and history graphs are unaffected by this
choice.
Worth being explicit about, because it is the gap between what PR #303
promises in the thread ("load their previously recorded states") and what any
correct version can deliver.
## Rejected: zeroconf
The issue's other suggestion — wire zeroconf so the device's own boot
announcement triggers a retry, which is the genuinely idiomatic HA answer —
is a non-starter as things stand: there is no `zeroconf` or `dhcp` key in
`manifest.json` and the config flow is user-driven only, so HA has no
discovery signal for this integration to hang a retry on. It would first need
a confirmed mDNS service on the appliance. Worth revisiting if one turns up;
it would make recovery near-instant instead of within one poll interval.
## Rejected: the cheap version
Keeping `ConfigEntryNotReady` and adding a probe that calls
`async_schedule_reload` on first success would have fixed the recovery *time*
in about twenty lines, with no persistence and no reconcile. It was rejected
because it leaves the device reading as broken for as long as the appliance
is off, which is the half of issue #295 that actually bites — an appliance
switched off at the wall is offline for days, not seconds, and a whole
integration that looks failed for that entire window is the complaint.