So many times I have tried to use one when I meant the other, and the only way to change it is to delete one action and add another. I wish you could switch between actions but keep the same entities in them. So for example if I set up a light.turn_on for 3 different lights, but then I copied it and pasted it into my off automation, I could just simply change the action to be light.turn_off without having to remember the entities I selected in my last action and put each one in again.
There is much room for improvement in this category, lets make home assistant automations easier to use.
I am not sure what the solution would be, though, given that most actions are not 1-to-1 transferrable. For example, when switching from light.turn_on to light.turn_off, what do you do with the brightness value?
You could just keep the options that are shared, no? The UI has a way to find out that certain options go with certain actions, so finding the overlap should be possible. And if it fails completely the worst case is that you have to delete the action. Which, in the current situation, you have to do always so it seems like an improvement to me!
There would need to be a way to know that settings were brought over and specifically which ones. You may unintentionally bring over unwanted settings.
The simplest form would be to only carry over the target section.
I agree with the WTH. But just so you know you can workaround this problem today, by clicking the 3 dots on the action you want to change, choosing yaml. Changing your turn_on to turn_off and then clicking the 3 dots again to change back to visual editor.
a lot of times, our automations are a succession of different actions on the same device. Like first turning on, then turning of some lights. I usually create and edit automations on my phone nowadays, so I usually copy and paste sections from my UI.
HOWEVER, when I created an action e.g. light.turn_on to be used on light.1, I can’t copy this action and change it to light.turn_off keeping the same entities. I would need to create a new action and search for the entities again or change it via yaml.
What I would like:
ability to change the action to another action of that category (light.turn_on / turn_off / toggle …) while keeping the entities and all possible attributes via Ui
You have my vote, I wished for this a few times as well. Of course there are only few actions that are interchangeable enough to allow this. Some need other parameters. Still, it would be useful. Also for building blocks. Switch an AND for an OR eg
In the mean time, especially for light turn on/off,quickest workaround is to go to YAML for this action and change an n into ff