What I'm trying to achieve is a rapid means to temporarily store the state of pre-selected devices. I would envision something similar to the dashboard functionality whereby a list of devices can be selected and assigned a group (similar to which devices are allowed to appear on a dashboard). Then, within RM, having the ability to call a function where each of the devices identified can have their current state stored either in a variable(s) or temporary file. The parameters being things like device id/on/off/flash/dim level/colour, etc. A separate function would be to restore all these devices to those properties when called.
An example... In certain alert situations such as a smoke detector is alarming, I have several lights in the home turn on to assist with egress in the night. In the event of a false alarm, or a resolved alarm, it would be great to return lights, receptacles and water valves to their pre-alarm state.
Have you looked at the "Capture" and "Restore" actions in Rule Machine to verify that they don't already do what you want without writing your own logic to do something similar? Note that each rule has its own "store," and any capture will overwrite a previous one. Other than that, its use and outcomes should be fairly intuitive.
Thanks! I can certainly work with capture and restore, it's very close to what I'm trying to achieve.
The only other piece would be to create and edit device groups, separate from any rule, that I can update and later call from within a rule. This way I wouldn't need to edit rules every time I add/remove a device associated with a category or grouping. This would help with being able to utilize these groups more easily from multiple different rules while adding/subtracting in a single location.
There are two options for that, Room Lighting or Groups and Scenes. The first is new and rather full-featured; the second is older but simpler for some to grasp. Either can "group" devices into something like a "group" (all devices commanded via a group device the same way) or "scene" (all devices activated according to some pre-defined settings), or in the case of RL, also both. With scenes, you'll also get a device you can use to re-capture states. (There is probably something like this in RL, too, but I've never tried to say for sure...)
So, depending on what you mean, one or more of those can probably also handle what you're asking.
