Automation Documentation: Enhance the “Automations” screen to let it become the documentation summary for your automations. If the following fields were added to the “Automations” screen, then this page could become the automation documentation repository:
- Description (maybe only the first 160 characters or such if this becomes unmanageable - I could easily put the key information into 160 or less characters)
- Trigger (use the trigger summary that HA already generates and displays when you open the automation)
BACKGROUND:
Currently I maintain a separate spreadsheet for my automation documentation. For each automation I list a category (eg “alert”), the trigger, the name,. the basic functionality (description) and a status flag (prod vs test).
Now this is very time consuming, and for some automations the documentation takes longer to write than the automation did, it’s also painful when I make minor changes to an automation (it seems that we “tweak” automations for quite some time to get them just right) and then forget to update the documentation.
I hate duplicating effort, and a lot of the documentation effort is cut and pasting from the actual automation. It seems to me that the effort could be dramatically reduced by some tweaks to the automation page. Currently the automation page gives the automation name and when it was last triggered (and a disabled / active flag). If the following fields were added to that screen, then this page could be my documentation summary:
- Description (maybe only the first 160 characters or such if this becomes unmanageable - I could easily put the key information into 160 or less characters)
- Trigger (use the trigger summary that HA already generates and displays when you open the automation)
As it is now, I try to cram the descriptions of the triggers and actions all into the name field - but the information I want is readily available in the automation code - I’m asking for it to be easily displayed.
