Advice on new feature - Trigger Home Assistant actions from Pattern Launcher

[Rafaesp]

Hi all,
I'd like ask for opinions on how to accomplish (develop) the following feature.

My final goal is to easily execute actions in my Home Assistant.
We already have the amazing HA app to send intents to HA but I'd like to save the few clicks that are needed and use the other amazing app Pattern Launcher so that I can directly trigger the actions from the home screen.

The main thing I don't know how to tackle is how to parameterised the "trigger name" or "extra data" that is sent with the intent so that my receiver logic can decide which action to trigger when it receives the intent. I am willing to have MacroDroid or Tasker logic to have more control in the receiving side if needed.

I see two options:

• Somehow create multiple apps with different parameters. In Pattern Launcher, I would select the different apps to select which action to trigger.
• Add support to intents to Pattern Launcher. Instead of selecting an application, we would configure which intent to send. This would need to be generic, but the intent name and extra config is usually a long string and would be difficult to type in the watch itself.

Both options have unknowns for me. Do you see how should they work? Do you see any other alternatives?

Thank you all.

[gfwilliams]

Hi! That seems like a really neat idea.

Personally, I think creating new apps might work quite well. Not just for Pattern Launcher, but potentially it allows you to have quick shortcut apps in the main launcher as well.

To do it, this might help: https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js+First+App#app-info-timer-app-info

So you could have an optional boolean value in the ha app's web interface that said addToLauncher, and if set, it would do:

require("Storage").write("ha.1.app.info",{
  "id":"ha.1",
  "name":"Home Assistant Shortcut",
  "shortName":"Office", // whatever 'display' was set to
  "files":"ha.1.app.js",
  "src":"ha.1.app.js"
});
require("Storage").write("ha.1.app.js",`
var ha = require("ha.lib.js");
var triggers = ha.getTriggers();
ha.sendTrigger(triggers[0].trigger); // or whatever the index of the trigger was
load(); // reload clock
`);

Potentially it could also set an icon as well, but that's a bit more painful to do. If you're thinking of modifying the home assistant app then you could actually modify it to use the icons library (https://github.com/espruino/BangleApps/tree/master/apps/icons) rather than its 4 built-in icons, so there were a few more options.

[gfwilliams]

Just to add, instead of doing this in the watch, it'd be in the app loader, so you'd need Util.writeStorage: https://github.com/espruino/BangleApps/blob/master/apps/ha/interface.html#L44-L46

[Rafaesp]

awesome! dynamically creating app infos is what I was missing, thanks!
I'll also try to use the icons app as you suggested.

[gfwilliams]

Great! The apps that are generated will appear in the app loader (with a question mark by them) and could be deleted from there, but I don't think that's going to be too big of a problem

[bobrippling]

If it's useful to you, the ha app presents clkinfo, so you can trigger directly from the clock screen.

I can't remember but I might have local modifications to this somewhere, if it doesn't quite fit you need