Novice Question - Updating Changed Device States

My Life360 plugin appears to be working fine, but I recently discovered that I update every device state regardless of whether it's value has changed. I do this because I incorrectly assumed that Indigo magically handled that during state saving. The problem obviously is that triggers always think a device state has changed, and fire unnecessarily.

Currently I do the following:
1) Call the API for each device_id in updatedevicestates which is called in a loop for each device from runConcurrentThread at the frequency chosen in pluginProps

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def updatedevicestates(self, device):

2) Get every state for that device from Life360 and save it in an array called device_states

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device_states.append({'key': 'member_first_name','value': m['firstName'] })

3) Update all the device states

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device.updateStatesOnServer(device_states)

What's the right way to update only the device states that have changed?

I would send the dict to a method that compares each state to the state value Indigo has and return a dict of only those states that have actually changed. There's a Python library called dictDiffer that Indigo uses for its own purposes. You should be able to import that directly in your plugin.

A word of caution with this: only users on Indigo 2022 or later will have this library automatically installed by Indigo, so if you want to support users of prior versions, you'll need to include the library in your plugin (or have users install it directly).

I assume this is something that every plugin needs to do? What do they do?

I assume this is something that every plugin needs to do? What do they do?

If I have a data source like yours, I update all the states every time. Haven't gotten any complaints. Are you sure it's actually triggering if the state value hasn't changed? Or that you're not sending multiple updates with different data?

I'll have to do more testing. Got some feedback that the geofence info was always changing via trigger even when it had not.

https://github.com/ryanbuckner/life360-plugin

You call to device.updateStatesOnServer() on line 366 has the wrong indent. It should be indented two more tab stops, I think.

[jay (support)]

The server should not fire a changed event, if the value of the state is set to the same value. You’ll want to make sure that you’re not setting the value to something else and then back in your code. We’ve had several occasions when a developer didn’t realize that they were setting the value do something else (like None or empty string) and then back to the original value.

The server should not fire a changed event, if the value of the state is set to the same value. You’ll want to make sure that you’re not setting the value to something else and then back in your code. We’ve had several occasions when a developer didn’t realize that they were setting the value do something else (like None or empty string) and then back to the original value.

For the geofence states, I'm likely doing some form of this because they are calculated values. I'll take a look and make sure I'm minimizing the areas where I set to empty string or 0 first.

You call to device.updateStatesOnServer() on line 366 has the wrong indent. It should be indented two more tab stops, I think.

FYI, this is probably why you're getting bogus updates. You're making that call even when the device doesn't meet your criteria for updating.

You call to device.updateStatesOnServer() on line 366 has the wrong indent. It should be indented two more tab stops, I think.

FYI, this is probably why you're getting bogus updates. You're making that call even when the device doesn't meet your criteria for updating.

Ohh, I see that. Thank you!