Feature Request : Ability to turn automation rules on/off

[JDRoberts]

@intensert

Would like to see the ability to turn automation rules (routines, smartapps) on or off. I sometimes want to disable automated tasks such as holiday lights that go unneeded for months at time. The only way to accomplish this is to delete the automation and re-created it when I need it again. The ability turn these on or off would be great.

There are a couple of ways to do this now, but they all feel like more work than they should be. As @Automated_House mentioned, there’s going to be a major redesign of the app this year, which may just bring what you want. So you might want to just wait and see.

If you really want this now, the two most common ways of doing it either with modes (huge set up work, but then the automation will run locally) Or with webcore ( but then it won’t run locally).

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

If you want to do it with modes, you basically have to create multiple sets of modes to handle every Calendar condition you may want.

So you would have

Home

Home holidays

Away

Away holidays

Etc.

Then you set up your holiday automations To only run during the holiday modes. And you set up some routine that will change from one mode to the other.

The mode method works, and it’s what we used to do before webcore existed, it’s just a lot of work To go back through all your automations and make sure each one is set up for the correct combination of modes.

Also, we used to be able to add new modes through the mobile app, but now you can only do it through the IDE.

So the mode method does work, And it has the advantage of only having to change one setting and being able to affect dozens of automations if you want. But it’s easy to miss a mode When you were setting up a new automation and then have automations running when you didn’t want them to.

So the capability exists now, it’s just more work than it should be. And the capability may well be coming with the new revision of the mobile app, we will just have to wait and see.

SmartThings app will receive a major overhaul in Q1 2018