Allow scripts/automations to continue after a failed action

Feature Requests
,
1

It would be useful to be able to specify that an action should not prevent further execution of a script/automation upon failure.

I have a sequence of actions that first attempts to pause any playback from a specific media player (using Spotify). However, if that media player is not playing, the service call will fail and the remaining actions in the sequence will not be executed.

In the above example, I’m fortunate that I can simply re-order the actions to place the failing one at the end. However, there will be other cases where multiple steps have the potential to fail and a ‘best effort’ to complete all steps may be preferred.

My proposal would be to introduce a syntax similar to that of the wait timeouts, where a user can currently specify continue_on_timeout with a boolean value. For actions within a sequence, a property such as continue_on_fail could be set by the user, defaulting to false if omitted to maintain backward compatibility.

2

Not the best workaround but you could use choose templates as actions.
So template is media player is playing, action pause.
But a short version of that could be handy.

Another option is Node red where you can put all call services in parallel.

3

Indeed, there are workarounds for specific cases if you anticipate where actions might fail. This is more so you can define something upfront as ‘best effort’ and not need to know all the ways in which it might fail ahead of time.

4

Isn’t that exactly what the wait templates together with a timeout do? :slight_smile: Wait for something to get to a specific state, and if not, move on after a set timeout… So in your case, wait for pause, if it won’t get there, move on after X minutes…

5

Not quite. Let’s say you call light.turn_off and for whatever reason it throws an exception. Now your script just ends prematurely. There’s nothing to wait for, since you’re the one issuing the service call in the first place.

6

exactly my problem right now… did you find any workarounds?
if (exec failed) then?

7

My current workaround is to have a script like script.play_media with all the variables etc and then call this script via the ‘indirect’ method as described here: Scripts - Home Assistant
Hope this helps

8

Agree, this has already negatively impacted me a few times but now I know to be cognizant of it.

9

I agree on this one. It is become more an more needed and it allows us to require all integration to fail on error (instead of suppressing it).

The result would be more predictable and consistent and allowing failure to become a conscious choice.

I’ve prepared a change for this. This PR start by creating a way to manually allow failure/stopping (and makes a clear distinction between aborting and stopping.

I’ll try to make a follow up for this feature request after that.

2 Likes
10

Implemented in:

Should become part of Home Assistant 2022.5

6 Likes
11

Hi @frenck, thanks for this!
I’ve just been troubleshooting a daily ZWJS battery level refresh that was not refreshing all entities and discovered one of my entity_id’s had changed for reasons that are obviously clear to me now that I’ve found it. It would be nice to obtain a direct notification of the failed automation action in addition to the standard logger entry. Something like on_error: service: notify.persistent_notification data: title: message: {{ error_message }}
Alternatively, does the error in the automation/script fire an event on the event bus that I could watch for? If not, might that be possible?

1 Like
12

Guys, updated to 2022.5

so yaml:


all_off:
  alias: Alles uit
  continue_on_error: true
  sequence:
  blabla...

but gives me:

2022-05-04 22:27:58 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.config] Invalid config for [script]: [continue_on_error] is an invalid option for [script]. Check: script->continue_on_error. (See /config/configuration.yaml, line 130).

13

It’s a property of an action, not of the script itself. Try moving continue_on_fail: true into one of your actions instead.

1 Like
14

It would be nice if this option were also available as a tick box in the UI editor…

11 Likes
15

I would like to see it as an option for the entire automation and not just one action. @frenck

13 Likes
16

Yes, please add it to entire automation

7 Likes
17

Hi guys,
so for now the only way to prevent actions terminate in case or error is set for every action the attribute continue_on_error to true?

Also for me it would be really VERY welcome to have the possibility to set it directly for all actions in both automations and scripts.
Unfortunately I am noticing several execution problems in the actions dependents cloud services (unfortunately for some devices there is no alternative…)

Thanks a lot for you amazing job :wink:

18

@frenck Frank, I don’t know if you’ve been following this conversation or not, but a number of users would like to see the ability to set the continue_on_error for all actions in an automation i.e. a global setting, if possible.
Also, it would be nice to see the option appear in the visual editor rather than resorting to yaml mode to add it. The other yaml only setting I would like to see in the visual editor is…

trace: 
  stored_traces: xx

Thanks.

4 Likes
19

Having a way to continue on error would be amazing - happens to me all the time especially on some lights with iffy connectivity…

Especially user friendly would be having a tick box in the UI and-or a way to just tell an automation once to ignore errors instead of for each step.

Also, might it not be better to have continue on error be a default in an automation, instead of failing out?

3 Likes
20

At least it’s visually apparent now…

image

Baby steps first I guess!