Active profile vs edited profile?

[hello-tomkitty]

Maybe it's just me, but I always get confused by active vs edited profile. When I select a profile for editing in the lower half (the schedule settings) and I'm told "Now editing xyz", I thought that's the profile that I'm actually changing and saving when I hit the save button. But that's not the case, is it? The chart seems to always show the current profile. I messed up things a couple of times, now I always set the profile I want to edit as active in addition to selecting it for editing. I'm sure I'm completely misunderstanding how I'm meant to use the editor. Can someone clarify what the correct way is to edit schedules for multiple profiles per group?

On a side note, I would love to have an option to disable autosave. It's easy to accidentally drag nodes around, particularly on small screens. There's no undo, and any accident is persisted immediately. You implemented a save button already, so having the option to use that exclusively would be nice.

[MEOoms]

I must admit that I find the terms profile and schedule somewhat confusing...
What is the difference? Are the profiles represented in the entities? How can I manage them?
A short index of the meaning of the terms would be helpful.

[hello-tomkitty]

When are you going to open the modal dialog? When a new profile is selected? Or are going to bring the Edit button back? It would be nice if one could edit several profiles in a row (which is my normal workflow) without multiple windows popping up.

[hello-tomkitty]

Yes, a glossary might be helpful, maybe a diagram. Groups, schedules, profiles: in which relationship are they to each other?

[kneave]

Maybe it's just me, but I always get confused by active vs edited profile. When I select a profile for editing in the lower half (the schedule settings) and I'm told "Now editing xyz", I thought that's the profile that I'm actually changing and saving when I hit the save button. But that's not the case, is it? The chart seems to always show the current profile. I messed up things a couple of times, now I always set the profile I want to edit as active in addition to selecting it for editing.

I suspect the save button isn't hooked up properly for this but you're trying to use it correctly for what it's worth, I don't actually use profiles myself so haven't used it in anger to hit issues like this. I've added an issue to track it so I can put some improvements in.

On a side note, I would love to have an option to disable autosave. It's easy to accidentally drag nodes around, particularly on small screens. There's no undo, and any accident is persisted immediately. You implemented a save button already, so having the option to use that exclusively would be nice.

Which version are you running? The Undo button has been in there for a while and should become active when anything is changed.

a glossary might be helpful

Good call! I'm planning on improving the documentation after I've got the UI settled, for now though I'll clarify the bits you asked. Now that I've started to write down an explanation I can see where you're coming from as I've internalised the architecture and haven't had to explain it properly so yeah, the docs improvements are very much needed. I'm going to write this in terms of the architecture for now as it's the easiest way to do it and I'm lacking the brain to do it differently. Groups vs Schedules is more of a mess than I realised too, that's definitely legacy from the early days of the integration and I'll give some context below.

Scheduler (Front end):

• This allows the user to create and edit schedules to apply to the various climate entities considered "monitored" by the integration
• It also allows for choosing which entities to monitor and if they should be controlled individually or grouped together

Coordinator (Back End):

• This runs once per minute and compares the state of the monitored entities against the state requested by the user via the schedules
• If the current time has a node assigned to it the state in that node should be applied to all the entities assigned to the schedule
• If the state of an entity has been changed by a user manually in the interim, that change will be respected unless the user calls "Sync Thermostats"

Schedule:

• Contains the climate settings to apply at specified times, as defined by the user
• These settings are contained within a profile, each schedule can contain more than one profile to enable the user to create different control schemes
• Previously there were single entity schedules and group schedules, see below for an explanation

Profile:

• Profile examples include: Home, Away, Vacation, Winter, Summer, or whatever the user needs.
• Profiles are stored at the schedule level so if you have a Downstairs and Upstairs schedule you'd need to create separate profiles within each

A Note on Groups:
When the integration was first created it just controlled individual entities, grouping entities was added afterwards and for a while there were separate code paths for each which was causing a headache from a dev perspective. I changed things around so that a group could have a single member instead so that we only had one set of code paths regardless of number of members.

I need to make the terminology more consistent but essentially Group and Schedule should be considered interchangeable for the time being.

I'll start a new discussion asking if anyone wants terms clarifying and track them all in there.

[hello-tomkitty]

Thank you for the detailed explanation, that helped me understand things better.

I just tried "Edit" again. Select the "vacation" profile from the drop-down, hit Edit, being told "Now editing profile: vacation", but the chart clearly doesn't show the vacation profile (which should be a low flatline basically), so I cannot edit it. For that I need to set the profile active.

About the Undo: running v1.14.12 and need to make an ophthalmologist appointment ASAP... OMG.

[kneave]

Yeah, just reproduced that at my end too so it definitely broke somewhere along the lines.

[kneave]

I've overhauled profile editing, editing a non-active profile now occurs in a separate UI. You can also change the schedule mode per profile, so you can have your default profile be 7 day and an away profile could be 24hr.
Please try it out here and let me know what works and what's broken.

[hello-tomkitty]

Wow, so much better. Thank you for spontaneous night-time tinkering. Things seem to work as far as I can tell. Will let you know if I find anything later.
I was wondering where schedules are filled from when I switch from 24hr to weekday. I don't have a default schedule, but the weekday / weekend schedules aren't empty. I guess if there's an old weekday/weekend schedule, you'd take that. Otherwise duplicate the existing 24hr schedule for starters? Or initialise the schedules as empty? How are you doing it?
I would place the Weekday/Weekend or Monday/Tuesday/... controls to the right of the 24hr/Weekday/7days drop-down, but that's just personal preference. We read from left to right, so general settings to the left and details to the right is more intuitive.

[hello-tomkitty]

Found an issue: if you select an existing profile with weekday/weekend schedules, neither weekday nor weekend schedule is initially selected. Not sure what schedule is actually displayed, but it's neither of the two. Once you select weekday or weekend, the editor shows the correct schedule. A default selection would help. Also, making the selection (Weekday, Weekend, Monday, Tuesday, ...) visually sticky would make things easier (reminding you of what you're editing). You could just use a drop-down, that would make the selection unambiguous and save space on small displays.

[hello-tomkitty]

Yeah, the profile editor just doesn't always pull up the right schedule. I had my vacation profile again just now. Profile editor kept showing a different schedule, I selected it several times from the drop-down, also reloaded in between. Only when I set the vacation profile active, the profile editor also showed the correct schedule. So there is still some connection between active profile and the profile editor. I understand you intended for these to be independent now, right?

[kneave]

Drop down makes sense for sure, annoyed I didn't think of that before!

In the main schedule editor it uses the current day to figure out which to show by default, I'll bet that bit isn't wired up properly in the profile editor. I'm using this as prep for creating individual schedule cards so a lot of code change behind the scenes.

I'm probably going to move the profile editor in to a modal window rather than expanding what's there as it currently is. I suspect it'll be a lot tidier.