A useful feature to add 'Broken Rule" in Red in the HE menu

Lately I've been doing testing of community apps and my own apps as well. I use rules to test things.
If the Rules on the HE menu which currently show 'Predicate False' in red could also show 'Broken' in red - it would be very helpful to track down impacted items. I inadvertently found 2 rules of mine that had been broken for nearly 2 months unbeknownst to me (I know why they were broken - I had removed the target speaks device). This would surely save some troubles and possible support requests...

And I remember ever more I can't seem to find with a search now. :slight_smile:

Nice idea, but the rule has no idea that it's broken until you open it, and it can't find the device you removed. There are warnings given before you remove a device that it is in use by an app, but the app itself has no 'awareness' of the device removal.

The only possible solution would be for the platform to have a new type of system event, sent to apps that are in use when a device is removed -- when the system is aware of this condition. Some device removals evade even this, such as Z-Wave devices excluded or LAN devices that go AWOL. Even with a new platform level support, there would need to be new app methods to receive such an event, and mark the app as broken. This platform change would not have very high priority, simply because there is already the warning given, and even then it wouldn't entirely solve the problem of users breaking their own system.

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darn. Not even a psuedo run through triggered during hub status checks/diagnostics?
oh well.

Iā€™m not sure what an app could do with such an event. Because all RM rule apps are child apps of RM itself, perhaps something could be done by RM to put up a notice, but it escapes me how anything could be done in response.

It would be straightforward. Each rule is able to put things in red in its name. So 'Broken' could be one of those. A method would be called by the platform when a device was ripped out from under that rule, and that method would change the name of the app to add the red Broken.

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Hi @bravenel,

Just wondering if this has made any movement?

I've had a Samsung ST Button programmed via Button Controllers stop working, sort of.
When it was pressed once a Group of lights was called but instead of calling the 2 lights, it called an extra light so I checked in Button Controllers first and saw a 'Broken Action' or 'Broken Rule' where I would normally see 'Toggle: GRP-Master Bedroom Wall Lights' sorry can't remember which one it was.

Anyway, an easy fix, edit, reselect the group, save and then remove the additional light from the group.

As I've had a couple of things wiggin out over the past couple of months, I've been slowly knocking them out one by one but it got me thinking, is there an App or a way to search Globally for broken actions or broken rules?

@bravenel

I forgot to say, I know 100% that I never changed the group but other faults I've found have definately been created by me :yum: