Hello,
I have had several rules in Rule-4.1 for a while now and I am looking into rewriting them in 5.0. However, it seems like RM-5 only has one action/trigger per rule? Is something like this no longer possible within RM-5 or is this now delegated to Button Controller 5?
I'm confused what the role of RM is now vs Button Controller, Basic Rules, Simple Automation Rules, etc.
The "Button Device" trigger type has been pulled from Rule 5.0. What it was, as you likely know, was basically a beefed up version of Button Controller, which was also available as a separate app (aside from a few releases where it was briefly returned in favor of just rules--but it came back). It added conditionals and a few things that plain BC did not have.
New in 2.2.8 comes a new version of Button Controller (version 5), which has nearly the same capabilities that rules do. It is also internally structured a bit differently, as you may notice that it now creates "grandchild" apps in your apps list, one for each button action you have configured (this was to facilitate things like repeats, where it was previously unclear whether you could cancel or modify one from another button action and apparently hard to enforce the desired behavior; they are now all separate). I would say that it is the recommended path between the three things under consideration here--"old" Button Controller (you can't create new child instances of these anyway), Rule 4.x with a "Button Device" trigger (you won't be able to create new Rule 4.x instances after firmware 2.2.8--but no need to move existing ones), and Button Controller 5.
Do note that you still can (and always could) create rules with a specific "Button" event as a trigger. In most cases, this is probably not what you want--certainly not if you want a single place to define multiple actions for different events from the same physical device. But it can still be useful in specific cases.
This is exactly what I wanted and it seems like Button Controller is the new place for it, thank you. I guess I no longer have a use for RM as my other automations are all in Webcore. I know I don't need to move existing rules but I'm guessing we will need to if we want them to work with new changes. Thanks again.
If you want to use hub variables, possibly--they more or less replace the "global variables" from Rule 4.x and earlier. But even then, you don't necessarily need to: you can create a connector for a hub variable, which is just a device, then you can use that device in any app, including any version of Rule Machine (or webCoRE). You can even use global variables from Rule Machine Legacy in Rule 5.x by way of a connector, too. Otherwise, I can't think of any compelling reason if you don't actually use Rule Machine.
Download the Hubitat app
