Right. That makes more sense. Sorry to doubt you @finity . I like to understand how and why things work rather than just accepting that they do and moving on.
Itās the engineer in me
Interestingly, when creating an If/Then in the UI it quite clearly includes āConditionā
I donāt deny the usefulness of branched logic, I just have never seen the point of the If/Then action. In the timeline of HAās development, the Choose action existed for a while before the If/Then action was added. My, perhaps incorrect, understanding was that it was meant to be less verbose than the Choose action and to appease the constant queries of āHow do I do an If/Then?ā.
It does seem strange to have If/Then in the Action section. I guess my next task would be to create an automation without If/Then that does the same as the automations I have using If/Then.
Where else would it go? Strictly speaking Triggers + Conditions already provide an āIfā and Actions provide the āThenā. So if you want further branching beyond that in the automation framework, your only option is to do it in Actions.
The Choose action provides the same If/Then/Else functionality with the addition of being able to accommodate āElse Ifā, which the If/Then action does not.
To elaborate: The typical case being when people want to combine multiple automations that uses the same triggers and conditions. Generally I donāt recommend that and rather have more and smaller automations, but still, many people do this.