Rule machine bug

[rlithgow1]

@ady.adrianu

21 replies and 0 solutions to 2 separate bugs . anything but solutions yet you wonder why i got a bad attitude

Yes we do wonder since no one in this thread is a Hubitat developer (Some are community developers but they don't work for hubitat or have access to the Hubitat code). Both @bravenel and general support have been notified. All you can do is wait for a response. In the mean time people are trying to get to the bottom of the "bug" by asking questions and seeing if they can replicat it. Offering a terse attitude in return helps nobody.

[marktheknife]

Yup, support team notified.

Best of luck to the OP.

[TArman]

Trying to be helpful here and explaining that while you have the rule open, changing the state of something that alters the Reqiured Expression true/false value is not recognized until you “tickle” the rule by updating it.
Again you have NOT shown evidence (logs, etc.) that indicates that this is a BUG.
Likely that’s why you are feeling ignored by HE support.

I tried, I’m tired, and I’m done here.

[hubitrep]

@ady.adrianu

Should go and randomly press update on rules from time to time to prevent from this from happening?

Hopefully not. But there is an "Update all rules" button on the parent "Rule Machine" app's config page you can use to... update all rules, if you want to.

@ady.adrianu

my rules are the same as months ago, why do they stop working for no apparent reason and I have to press update manually to get them back on track ???

Impossible to tell from the evidence you have presented so far. Not clear how you got the rule's required expression evaluation to be out of sync with the switch state; somehow the rule must have missed an on-to-off transition event. Since the switch is being mirrored via Hub Mesh, could be that the event happened on the hub where the device is paired while the hub that hosts the rule was rebooting, just to give one example that comes to mind.

@ady.adrianu

how is you pressing the update button any different from me switching on and off the switch to make the rule working again?

Update reinitializes the rule so it re-evaluated the state of the required expression even though there was no switch event to trigger that evaluation.

Could also be there was a problem with the rule's subscriptions, which Update would have fixed, too, but if that was the case, flipping the switch on and back off would not have restored its state. You can check the rule's event subscriptions to make sure they are correct by clicking the circled-i icon.

@ady.adrianu

Also, why no word about my main post and the inconsistencies between conditions?

@bravenel, the author of the Rule Machine app, has not posted on the forum for many months. I too reported some issues that have yet to be acknowledged by HE staff. My guess is that they are busy fixing other things that make a bigger difference to their users (and bottom line) than bugs for which workarounds exist. Still frustrating, I get it.

[hubitrep]

@ady.adrianu

what more could I possible post other than the rule being read wrong after my automation didin't work as expected?

Hub logs showing evidence of a bug are best, but there's nothing you can do about it after the fact. That would require turning on Event and Trigger logging on the rule(s) and description logging on the device. You can still do that if you think the problem will happen again.

Something you can still do (soon) after the fact is check the focus switch's device events (from the device details page on the hub where the rule runs) and double-check that the event that should have triggered the rule is there.

The point is: more information is needed in order to reproduce a bug and fix it.

@ady.adrianu

Why do I need to press the update to put the rule back on track

I already acknowledged that you shouldn't have to, but you asked a direct question about the difference between Update and flipping the switch, and I provided one, that's all.

@ady.adrianu

There is nothing to check

In that case, I can't help you, sorry.

If required expressions were broken in such a way that switch events were randomly missed, you can imagine there would be more than one user reporting that. So if what you are reporting is truly a bug - whether it is in Rule Machine, Hub Mesh, device driver, device itself - it is probably subtle and requires more information.

My advice:

• Use the "Update all rules" button in the Rule Machine parent app to make sure all rule subscriptions (required expressions and triggers) are clean
• Turn on logging on the rules you had issues with and the device(s) involved
• Wait and see if the issue happens again

Good luck.

[ady.adrianu]

if i was able to reproduce the bug I would, this rules have been working for months as I said so is a random bug that I have no idea what happened and 3 rules all 3 having the same condition failed .

I already checked the logs and I said, there's nothing there, expression turned false as it should when focus switch was ON, then when focus was turned off the expression falsely remained false, no other logs shown

Given the randomness nature of the bug I don't have any expectations to be fixed, I can just hope it won't happen again, it wasn't a big deal but obviously annoying to come downstairs after 3h and still finding your lights on