Rule Machine - UI Suggestions

šŸ“ Rule MachineĀ® All things Rule Machine
1

I'm getting familiar with Rule Engine after a few hours.

But I think a few simple UI changes would help new users "get it" more, and make it easier to work with visually.

  1. Somehow highlight the "thing" you're currently working on (or "dim" the stuff you're not)
    If you're editing a Rule Expression it shows everything on one white page with a duplicate of the expression you're working on. But it's difficult to "see" that you're in the context of the expression.

  2. Keep script-blocks visually identifiable. So proper indents on multiple peer-conditions/actions. And then show the current evaluations off to the side, aligned together. So example:

Bleh, i dont know how to format text in markdown.

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1 Like
2

I did a similar proposal a few months ago (New Rule Machine UI proposal).
I've got a response from Bruce Bravenel. Please check it.

3

Yea I image the whole thing has to be pretty light-weight. Difficult to pack in features.

4

I agree with you. My idea was to show a quite full featured UI to incite Hubitat to start a discussion about what could be done or not.

What I discovered later is that the framework used by HEā€™s to implement itā€™s UI is really very limited, in particular regarding tables.

If we take a look not only within RM, we can see that HEā€™s UI is not particularly rich in resouces and sometimes very cumbersome.

Letā€™s hope that someday it changes. I love doing rich UIs but at the same time ease to use and maintain.

Best regards !

5

It cant use CSS to put more load on the browser? Maybe adding all the tags would make it to heavy.

6

Using CSS and JavaScript could be one way of overcome the limitations of the native UI, handling the all editing of the RM "code" locally in the browser.

However, to do that, Hubitat would have to made available APIs to handle RM rules from JS browser code. It would open limitless possibilities of creating/editing RM rules. It could be implemented, for example, receiving an JSON string with the rule and, after edited, send it back, waiting for the validation from RM engine of the edited JSON. Not to mention some others API calls requesting available devices and so on.

But - there's always a but, no? - the way we interact with RM to build rules I don't think that could be easily implemented on the HE side.

Let's see what Hubitat has on their sleeve for the future ...

7

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