General Category > Ideas/Feature requests

Rules Improvements

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btosch:
Its nice to see the rules working in the beta.  But the basic IF/WAIT/THEN structure is not enough to do much meaningful.  Here are some things that would allow me to do more than just demo rules.  These aren't really novel so hopefully they are on the roadmap already.

- Sunrise/Sunset.  When you are as far from the equator as I am (Seattle) time based rules pretty much have to be indexed to sunrise/sunset to be of any use.

- Get/Set Variables.  For example, I would like to be able to "arm" the house with the keyfob.  The rules need to check if the house is "armed"

- Check status of sensors in rules.  For example, I want to turn a light off when the door is closed, but only if another door is also closed.

LGNilsson:
The first two are planned, not sure how we'd do the third one, but I'll pass on your feedback to the software team.

Automate:
Seems like for #3 you could add the ability to have AND  and also OR statements in the conditions of the IF.

LGNilsson:
Well, AND is there already to a degree as you can have multiple IF and multiple THEN. So if you have two IF's, then both have to be true before the THEN is done.

btosch:
The problem, at least for me, is that I need to evaluate the state after the wait/timeout.  For example, if I close a door, I want to wait 1 minute and then turn a light off, but only if the door is still closed.

I don't know if its best to start a new thread, but here are some more rules features that I would put to immediate use.  In the end this is really why we need a scripting interface because you'll just be trying to emulate as much in the GUI.

- Ability to repeat/loop the THEN clause.  Repeat X times.  Repeat until Y sensor state. Repeat until Z time.
- Ability to call a rule from another rule
- Ability to have rules with no trigger.  Effectively sub-procedures to be called by other rules
- An alternate implementation of the above 2 would be the ability to define and send virtual events and then build rules that triggered on the virtual events.
- Ability to cancel a rule in progress.  Otherwise rules rapidly descend into overlapping chaos especially if you use wait clauses.
- A log of all sensor events, rule executions, and command sent as a result.  Maybe I am missing this?  I had a rule that was working, but is not now, and I don't know why.

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