Action Group to call other Action Groups?

Posted on
Fri Feb 23, 2018 7:13 am
jalves offline
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Joined: Jun 16, 2013

Action Group to call other Action Groups?

I've got about 30 different action groups in my setup. Most are fairly simple in that they control a few devices that I want to act as one. But I've also got a few that do an extensive (20) number of things to set a scene. Wondering if in that case it makes any sense (efficiency or avoiding "collisions") to call other action groups to do parts of the scene.

For example, I've got a action group called "Maids" that I trigger whenever the bi-weekly house cleaning crew comes. That scene does things like unlocks the front door (z-wave), turns on nearly every controlled light inside the house (combination of Insteon and Z-wave), turns off the overhead fans (Insteon) and raises the shades/blinds fully (z-wave). There's ~25 steps in that scene. And there's a corresponding one to reset everything when they leave. Wondering if in the Maid scene if it would be easier/better to call out my separate "raise blinds" scene rather than individually raising each blind in the maid scene.

Its not really that much of a problem to maintain the scenes the way I've done it already. Sometimes though when adding new devices it would be easier to just add the device to one scene rather than have to remember to add it to the 5 other's that it would logically go with too.

Running Indigo 2023.2 on a 24" iMac M1), OS X 14.4
Jeff

Posted on
Fri Feb 23, 2018 8:43 am
Colorado4Wheeler offline
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Re: Action Group to call other Action Groups?

jalves wrote:
For example, I've got a action group called "Maids" that I trigger whenever the bi-weekly house cleaning crew comes.

I have the exact same action group for my maids that turns on lights, opens drapes, etc, and I handle it pretty much the same way. An action group for when they arrive and one for when they leave.

jalves wrote:
Wondering if in the Maid scene if it would be easier/better to call out my separate "raise blinds" scene rather than individually raising each blind in the maid scene.

I see action groups like I see functions in programming, if it's something you are going to reuse then make a library - in this case if it's something you will use elsewhere then make another action group for it so it can be called from your other things - but it if's one-off then put it in a single action group. That's my way of doing things.

In my case I do have action groups that open and close my drapes and so I do call those for any action, including my maid actions, that need to perform that task.

From a system standpoint I cannot see that it'll make things better or easier and, in fact, having multiple action groups could actually complicate things. I have a couple early complex action groups that can be a nightmare to work on because they are nested so deeply that I have to hop from one to the next to the next. Now Indigo makes this much easier because you can edit an action group from its calling schedule, trigger or action group but still.

That's my $0.02 worth ;).

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Posted on
Fri Feb 23, 2018 10:18 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: Action Group to call other Action Groups?

From a system/performance issue, there isn't any significant difference. So really it's just a matter of which is better for you from a management perspective.

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Posted on
Fri Feb 23, 2018 11:54 am
jalves offline
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Joined: Jun 16, 2013

Re: Action Group to call other Action Groups?

Appreciate the feedback!

Running Indigo 2023.2 on a 24" iMac M1), OS X 14.4
Jeff

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