Sequential Action Lists

If you have a feature you'd like to see in Indigo, post it here. Others can refine the idea if they like. Please keep each topic to one feature or a closely related set of features and don't add other unrelated requests to an existing topic. Use the Hardware Support Requests forum below to request support for some bit of hardware - but be sure to check the 3rd Party Plugins Forum first though to make sure there isn't already a plugin for it.
NOVAmike
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Sequential Action Lists

Post by NOVAmike »

I've lately found several instances where it would he handy to be able to check a box associated with action lists (including those in schedules and triggers) that would have each action execute to completion before the next one starts. This would allow me to avoid annoying races between the individual actions. I can get something like that using delayed executions but the result is finicky when adding or removing actions and is prone to malfunction if the time an action takes to complete varies.

I also think this would need a subordinate check-box where you could specify whether or not execution of the list ignores actions that fail.
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jay (support)
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Re: Sequential Action Lists

Post by jay (support) »

This comes up every few years or so, and I thought I had a writeup of it somewhere, but it escapes me now. EDIT: less than that actually, doing some searching I found < 10 times over the years.

Here's the problem: Indigo is optimized such that actions almost always execute in parallel (asynchronously, in separate threads or processes). This is for performance: when users want something to happen, they most often want it to happen as fast as possible. This approach is almost always the way to go, but when you have some dependencies then it's a bit harder to deal with. We've done what we think is the best alternative by allowing delays before action execution.

Bottom line: it would require a non-trivial amount of effort to make all possible actions configurable to either be async or sync (some of them would require a huge amount of effort as to be obviously not worth it), and without doing that, attempting to add any more sync specification in the UI would just not be worth the effort because it wouldn't work consistently.
Jay (Indigo Support)
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