Feature Enhancement Request: Rule Machine Trigger Event for the same time on a series of dates

Rule Machine can set a Trigger Event based on certain time with an optional date.

I'd love if that could be based on a certain time for optional dates. (One to Many instead of One to One)

Use Case: The local School District has implemented a number of Late Start days, but with no easily programmable pattern. (i.e. Usually every 2 weeks, but not in a handful of circumstances around holidays.)

I brute forced it this year and created 16 different trigger events, but it would have been handy to choose the time and then build a list of dates with one trigger event.

This would also be helpful in handling other recurring events that are not predictably scheduled.

It seems like this is already possible, unless I am misunderstanding your request:

  1. Create a trigger for the one specific time, then
  2. Add a required expression that encompasses each of the specific dates (a condition of "between two dates" with a specific month/day selected for both the start and end date is how to a specific day, or you can, of course, do a range).

A required expression prevents rules from triggering, so your rule will not trigger on days outside of the expression. It's a bit of clicking to set up the dates, but I think you'd have that problem no matter how you do it.

For example, to trigger at 8 AM on October 13 and November 3, with other dates easily being added or these changed, all without the need to modify the single trigger:

Screenshot: Rule 5.1 as described above

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Thanks for the reply. Your approach would accomplish the expected result.

I still think the bit of clicking could be avoided if this:
2022-10-13_15-50-25
Would allow me to specify multiple dates either through a CTRL click on the dates in the date picker or by entering a list of dates [12/1/22, 12/8/22, 1/23/23. . .].

As a general rule, we aren't going to add more features to Rule 5.1 that are duplicative of existing ones to accomplish the same thing. Rule is a large and complex app, and it doesn't need to be made more so. What you're suggesting is not actually feasible with our date picker (right click).

There is another way you can do something like this with a cron string, and those can be entered into Periodic Schedule trigger.

Cron Strings and the Periodic Scheduler trigger event won't work because the dates I'm working with aren't periodic.

If the answer is that allowing a list of dates to be entered isn't worth it the time, complexity or whatever really, I get it. But I wanted to mention what I saw was an opportunity to avoid manual creation of trigger events.

Thanks anyway!

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School calendars were my primary use case to the GCal Calendar search app to help automate wake up schedules. You can read more about it here:

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Holy cow, that looks promising. I'll have to dig into it. Thank you!

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Yep, that will do exactly what is needed.

And enable a bunch of other triggers/actions I was previously ignorant of.

Thank you!!!

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