Pausing / Resuming active rules with active timers

📐 Rule Machine®
1

Lets say I have a RM rule that has been activated. This rule contains a timer based action, which simply repeats a thing every minute until a specific condition is reached.

So, this rule is actively running, and is paused by another rule. What happens next?

  • Does the currently running instance of the rule pause in action? Or does it simply cancel unfinished timers and then prevent further execution when pausing? Or does it continue to it's completion but further execution is paused?

Then, that same rule is later un-paused.

  • Will it's previously active timers continue from where they were paused in action? Or, does the rule execution simply un-pause allowing new instances of the rule to be triggered?
2

My understanding is that if you pause a rule all pending actions are stopped.

When you un-pause the rule nothing happens until it is re-triggered. No previous pending actions will restart.

If someone more knowledgeable knows different, then I will be interested to know as well.

3

This is the behavior I kinda expect and hope for. Maybe @gopher.ny would be able to confirm?

4
  • Pause: Will prevent actions from running in response to trigger events and, if the rule actions are currently running, will pause at the current location until resumed.
  • Resume: Un-does these changes, i.e., trigger events will now cause the rule to run actions like normal. If the rule actions were in progress when paused, will also resume at the then-current point.
    • TIP: Rules can be paused and resumed from other rules (not just manually via these buttons!).
5 Likes
5

Glad the question was asked, because I was unsure as well and it would seem I was wrong.

1 Like
6

I guess technically this way gives a higher degree of flexibility. To make it work the way you thought (and I wanted for my use case), you'd just need to add a "Cancel Rule Timers" action just before the "Pause Rule" action. This works in my testing.

1 Like
7

Thanks for that! I thought that pausing only paused the trigger - good to know it also pauses the actions!

And this is much faster than how I would have found out… by creating a rule, turning on logging, and pausing it to see what it would have done.