This trigger captures updates to a specific ToDo Item and also gets the updated content w/o get_items

Share your Projects!
1

I find that ToDo items can persist large state (i.e. > 255 chars) and so are invaluable for certain automations, state machine operations, configurations.

(I also wanted to share this because there is so much old, misinformation out there to search, such as platform: template, and using conditions when they are not necessary, etc.. If you treat entity_id as a singleton instead of array, it won't match even if there's only one id.)

I use the following in my watchdogs to trigger when large state items change:

triggers:
  - event_type: call_service
    event_data:
      domain: todo
      service: update_item
      service_data:
        item: Switch States               # my specific to do list item name
        entity_id:
          - todo.gallipot                      # my specific to do list name
    trigger: event
conditions: []
actions:
  - variables:
      desc: "{{ trigger.event.data.service_data.description }}"
# the above captures the to do list description contents
# which I usually populate with pseudo json text
# and convert to json object for subsequent use as follows:
  - variables:
      descobj: |-
        {{
          desc | 
            regex_replace("([\+\-a-zA-Z0-9_\.\'\%\’]+)", "\"\\1\"") | 
            regex_replace("\" \"", " ") | 
            replace("'", '') |
            from_json
        }}

fyi, my pseudo json looks like this:
{ tapo_plug_d9b8_outlet: on, tapo_plug_0955_outlet: off }
(no quotes for anything).