Help understanding Organizing Automations

Configuration Zigbee
1

Very new to HA, and having trouble understanding organization of Automations overall.

I’m coming over from Smartthings/Homekit, and can’t figure out how to properly organize automations, since this is so much more powerful and flexible.

Example:
In Smartthings-Symphonisk (Ikea) music switch
Go to configuration page and MOST is already configured (Play, FF, RW, etc)
Go to the “Dot” and choose what you would like it to do.

In HA:
Go to ZHA, choose device to configure
NOTHING is configured at all
Click Automations and create one for Play Button
Click Automations and create one for FF Button
Click Automations and create one for RW Button
Click Automations and create one for “Dot” Button
Etc, etc, etc

Now I have 7 Automations for just One Symphonisk Switch, and I have 5 of them

I program 5 Music Switches, and now I have 35 Automations just for that.

I can see this ending up in the 1000s of individual automations pretty quickly.

Is there not a way to “Organize” Automations so that ALL Automations specific to a Device “Nest” within each other so it’s easy to know what goes with what?

In my mind, I should be able to do something like this:

  1. Music Switches
    A. MBR Switch
    A1. Play Button
    A2. FF Button
    B. LR Switch
    B1. Play Button
    B2. FF Button Etc…

(The above was all supposed to Tab justify, but it’s not for some reason, so I added letters/numbers)

And that should all fall under one automation umbrella, or at least one per indivual device.

Does that make sense? Does it just not work this way, or am I not doing my programing correctly?

I’ve tried searching, but I’m obviously not using the right search term, as I’m not finding what I am looking for, and I am sure someone has asked a similar question before.

Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction!

2

Organization?? LOL!

OK, joking aside,
what’s wrong with six automations to control six functions? That is how it’s done in Home Assistant. Some people like to show off their Java prowess and combine as many options as they can into one automation, but this only makes the resulting configuration difficult to read and difficult to troubleshoot.

The front-end is where you organize them. You can organize them in several ways but the easiest is the Entities card.

For example:
ecard

Put preformatted text into code tags: </>

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You can create one automation that triggers when any specified button is pressed and then chooses what to do based on which button was pressed. This allows you to have one automation per Symfonisk switch. If you want to get fancy, you can have one automation that can monitor the buttons of multiple switches.

Rather than build your own automation(s) for a Symfonisk switch(es), you may wish to consider using a pre-built Blueprint. There are several to choose from:

https://community.home-assistant.io/search?q=symfonisk%20%23blueprints-exchange%20order%3Alatest

One blueprint can be used to generate automations for multiple Symfonisk switches (so you end up with just one automation per switch). That’s much easier to organize than 35.

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5

Honestly I must be too new to understand what you are showing here. My bad.

6

Yes! This is exactly what I meant by them appearing Nested.

Now I just have to figure out all the variables inside, as there is much more showing than I am seeing when I look at my individual automations. So I’m guessing that overall that’s a good thing as I learn to read them.

I really appreciate it!

7

Thank you, I’ll take a look at Categories too.

8

The front-end. What you see when you point your browser to homeassistant.local:8123

The Home Assistant front-end is so configurable that I seriously doubt that you will find any two alike.

For example, this is my garage view:

garage
garage1680×994 143 KB

Go ahead and experiment. Click on the pencil icon then the + on the next page, and here, create your view. Call it tests, experiments or fred. (Call it anything that isn’t already used.) In your test page, go wild. Add cards, experiment, play with it. You can’t hurt anything.