Conditions in automations

Configuration
1

I recently learned that you can use conditions in scripts! This changed my life, or at least a lot of my YAML. It got me thinking. Keep in mind that I have no idea how much work I’m proposing for the developers of this project, and I don’t know a better place to talk about it.

What if condition wasn’t just a top level section of an automation, like trigger and action, but could be integrated into the action portion of the automation and sub-conditions could be embedded into a higher-level condition. I’ll give an example of what I mean:

automation:
  test_automation:
    trigger:
      - some trigger
    action:
      - script.no_condition
      - condition:
          # any of the regular automation conditions could be here
          # I'm going to use 'time' as an example
          condition: time
          weekday:
            - mon
            - wed
            - fri
          # in addition to the conditions' regular keys, there's
          # also an 'actions' key that contains actions that are
          # only executed if the containing condition is satisfied
          action:
            - script.monday_wednesday_friday
      - condition:
          condition: time
          weekday:
            - tue
            - thu
          action:
            - service.tuesday_thursday
            # You can also embed a condition inside a condition
            - condition:
                condition: state
                entity_id: boolean_input.some_toggle
                state: 'on'
                action:
                  - script.tuesday_thursday_optional

So, on Mon, Wed, & Fri, this automation would run

  • script.no_condition
  • script.monday_wednesday_friday

Then on Tues & Thurs, it would run

  • script.no_condition
  • script.tuesday_thursday
  • and possibly script.tuesday_thursday_optional depending on the state of input_boolean.some_toggle

This style, combined with the stackable ‘and’ and ‘or’ conditions, could be super-powerful. I have found myself writing multiple automations with the same trigger, but different conditions and actions several times. I’ve thought about trying to re-write them into one automation with templates or something, but I thought this seemed like a reasonable approach to better “embrace the YAML”.

Am I nuts, or would this be cool?

2

OK, let me change your life again…:smile:

You can already put conditions in the “action:” section, too.

How many life changing events can you handle in a short period of time? :wink:

3

Yeah, I saw that, but they treat everything as a single linear execution. I was envisioning potentially multiple conditions each with their own set of actions where even though one condition fails, a subsequent condition could still succeed and execute its actions.

That, and the conditions within conditions are where it gets super powerful for me.

4

You can already do that too but it is a bit more complicated.

To do what you want you can use templates to define service call in actions based on certain if/elif/else conditions.

then you can have a list of service calls with different templates.

action;
  - service_template:
    {% if ('states.some_entity.state', 'some_state') %}
      some_service
    {% else %}
      some_different_service
    {% endif %}
    entity_id: some_entity
  - service_template: >
    {% if ('states.some_entity.state', 'some_state') %}
      some_service
    {% else %}
      some_different_service
    {% endif %}
    entity_id: some_entity
  - service: some_service
    data_template: 
      entity_id: >
        {% if ('states.some_entity.state', 'some_state') %}
          some_entity
        {% else %}
          some_different_entity
        {% endif %}
1 Like
5

Yeah, and I am doing that in most cases for the automations that require it, but if I have the choice, I prefer to “embrace the YAML”. It usually leads to better error messages from the config checker when I make a mistake. Debugging templates is horrible.

6

Strike two!

ok…then nevermind. :grinning:

Now, if I can just come up with something else you already know…:thinking:

:smile: