Can someone comment on this article. It appears to be factually entirely incorrect in suggesting the the rules engine is AND focused. I can only create OR triggers.
If you create a Hello Home action with multiple “Automatically preform” triggers it specifically says eg. “Automatically preform “Good Evening” when… Someone Arrives OR Sunset” WTF!?
You are correct.
The blog is wrong as far as I can tell… (I’m open to be shown I’m wrong, of course).
The only “AND” option available in many SmartApps (but not even in the Hello Home example) is “AND mode is” (or “Run only if mode is…”).
(Of course, if we could add more of our own Phrase Solution SmartApps, then we could put in AND conditions as well as OR conditions.)
The article is half right, as pertains to “More Options”. For example, in the restrictions on motion events, under More Options: Only during a period, Only on days of the week, Only if the mode is… Those are ANDs. All of those tests must pass for the motion event to be accepted. The groovy code is literally “modeOk && daysOk && timeOk”. What the article says about Hello Home phrases is confusing and mostly wrong. Your observation about “Automatically perform…” is obviously correct.
Do you guys know if there is any work on the way to make the application more friendly towards and/or conditions? I am constantly frustrated with some things working and having different options than others. For example I have setup a new mode called “Guests” which is triggered when I open the main door wich adjusts the air conditioning settings and turns on a few lights but I only want this to happen on the evening time window. If this was driven by sensors there would be such option but open/close door doesn’t allow me to set a time.
Right now, it depends where you live.
If you have a US account, there are a couple of third-party rules engines which are very popular. Discussed in the following thread (this is a clickable link)
Unfortunately, if you have a UK account, the ability to use these kind of third-party services is currently broken. Hopefully it will be fixed soon since that also affects IFTTT and other official integrations.
First off, don’t hold your breath waiting for new functionality from ST. You need to figure out how to do your automations with things as they are now.
If you’d like, I could write a small app for you that does this. That would be, change to a selected mode upon a selected open event, but only within a time-of-day window (includes sunrise / sunset options). That’s not much code and very easy. I would assume you could automate the lights separately, but let me know if that’s not the case.
Below is a link to the small app, called “Change mode on open”. It allows “restrictions” to be specified to make this only work under certain circumstances: time-of-day (including sunrise / sunset with offsets), days-of-week, and mode (that restriction refers to the mode before the door is opened). Let me know if this works for you. 