[Feature Request] Combine automations

[reconbot]

One of the wonderful aspects of this type of automation is that you can combine multiple flows into one automation. I've got systems that span 6-10 automatons and are a nightmare to reason about. Combining them all into a single automation would make life a lot easier and make it more straightforward to share logic.

So the ability to select multiple automation and import them into a new one would be amazing.

[FezVrasta]

The problem is that they would then have to be saved as a single automation on HASS. I'm not sure that would be desirable

[reconbot]

That would be desirable! That's my goal. All the logic in one place, all the traces, variables, etc. My use case specifically, is my kids each have a moon light with an RGB bulb. They each have an IoT button to go along with it. The light gets dimmer as it gets later and turns off after 15 minutes after bedtime so they can read. Double clicking or holding the button does whatever they want it to do. (blink, turn red, turn blue, rotate colors, etc)

The first kid who's older and had a light longer, I've had more time to play with approaches. I've used scenes, external state helpers, scripts, collections of automatons with "on for X time" triggers, or timer helpers. I had to change the light entity at one point and there were about 14 places to do it between automations and scenes. It was rough and I got the behaviors wrong a few times as "on" is never just on. It's a reusable flow chart of decisions to figure out the brightness that I have to copy a few places.

With the second moon, I had two scripts, one which was a collection of moon actions. You'd invoke that script to turn on the moon, turn it off, blink, whatever. And a script that used external state to decide what to do in response to button presses. Eg, turn on the light and set the timer, go into a blink flow and then back to on, etc. And finally an automation to wire the button's events up to the script using trigger ids for input to the script. It was easy to reason about but the traceability was rough. It behaved weirdly sometimes and I don't know why. The chain of automations and scripts were rough to follow.

With CAFE I can have all the triggers, shared flows for the common behaviors eg (one path for "on"), time events, etc in the same place. I'm trying to figure out variables but I think that's the last piece so I don't have to hard code common values (eg, when is bedtime?). The debugging is much easier to follow in HA and the event simulator is promising.

[reconbot]

Oh and a solid example in use today (where I found the bugs I reported, and why I opened this feature request). I have a fan on my drying rack that turns off after 6 hours. It uses a timer helper so you can see how much longer it has left to run and you can stop it yourself. It was 4 automations and now it's 1 that's pretty easy to follow. A vast improvement imho.

[FezVrasta]

I see. So would you like an option to "add/import" an automation into the already open automation/canvas?

[TheToto]

I had also mutiple automation per button to handle simple click, double click , .....
With CAFE, I have only one automation that handle every aspects of this button.

Btw, I used the copy/paste function to merge them, it is fast and works great.

[reconbot]

Having multiple tabs open gets weird sometimes so I try not to do that. But yes add/import would be pretty great.