Thought Of Using Groups For Notification To Individuals

[user837]

Good day everyone. Hope the community enjoying HE and doing well!!

Current Coding Of Notifications:
When coding a notification action in any HE functions (i.e. HE Safety Monitor, Notifications, Room Lighting, Rule Machine, Amazon Echo, Broadlink System Manager, Echo Speaks, GeoFency, device activity check, button controller, etc. ) I am currently defining the device names of each individual I want to receive the notification. For example, in the notification below, two individuals are receiving the notification of a loss of commercial power on a critical infrastructure core network switch in the RM rule.

Current Operational Issue:
Maybe like many of us, over time leveraging the functionality of HE has resulted in 165 Rules / buttons , etc. (or for many of you even much more ) that now have this static coding of the device name. Recently geofencing stopped working on one of these devices which required me to remove and reinstall the device; however, prior to doing so I had to remove the device from every application in which the device was being used. All 165 of them. Since HE makes it a simple mouse click with a list at the bottom of the device in which it was being used, admittedly it is not hard to do but it is time consuming to remove and then having to double back and add them all back in for a total of 330 entries doesn’t really help much either. So armed with a new battery for the mouse LOL a multiple cups of coffee mission accomplished .

Suggestion For Considers Or Other Proposals:
When coding the notifications would it be possible to use groups that contain the target recipients instead of the actual recipients? In this way, the rule may never need to be touched again after being created. For example, the notify statements in the rules would provide a group name; for example Group-SystemLevelMessages. When the need came about to remove the phone all I would have needed to do was edit this group (SystemLevelMessages) and removed the errant device. That would have been it. Never needing to touch the 165 individual rules twice a total of 330 times.

I will be the 1st to admit I can’t imagine this to be a simple request. But maybe in a future, future, future release has a system dialogue panel where some sort of higher level overarching configuration are established. As these systems continue to groups simplicity of the UI and ease of use will be very helpful. Which HE has done and excellent job of balancing these types of requests.

I have multiple hubs. In my case my primary hub has primarily two classes of individuals. One wants to know everything going on (Group-SystemLevelMessages). The second class is (Group=UserLevelMessages), they could care less about the IT side of things. My rules would contain either one or both groups. I mention this only if there would even be the possibility to share these groups globally across hubs.

There may be other use cases of using local resources in groups and those groups being used in the actual code.

Thanks for everyone’s time and thoughts,
Don

[FriedCheese2006]

There's an app for that:

Global Notification Device Variable?

Try this Notification Proxy app and driver combo I wrote to address this need for myself. You can create a virtual device using the proxy driver, then you can use that virtual device in all of your rules/apps instead of the real ones. The Notification Proxy app allows you to assign "real" devices to that virtual device and switch them out at will. (You can also create multiple virtual devices for different needs--I have one that only does my mobile devices and one that does those plus my tablet…

[user837]

This sounds great. I really appreciate your sharing this with me.

I won’t be able to work on it until Tuesday but will definitely follow up with you. Thanks again so much!!

[stueyhughes]

Hi guys, wouldnt this work nicely?

[user837]

Thanks to everyone who responded. I implemented the application developed by FriedCheese2006 and it works PERFECTLY. Thank you again so much!!

Since it worked I did not have the need to try the recommendation made by stueyhughes but I do want to revisit that in the near future so I can learn the functionality from that suggestion. Thank you for contributing as well. I appreciate it equally as well!!

Several questions for the developer. (1) Do you know if there are any problems if the groups are shared across hubs using hub mesh? (2) What is the best way to send a contribution for your efforts? I have always done this for apps I use. Of course no strings attached. I just like to show my appreciation for the amount of time and effort that goes into the development of, and my appreciation for the willingness of folks who share of these tools.

Don

[FriedCheese2006]

@stueyhughes

wouldnt this work nicely?

It would for doing a replacement but would not be able to handle add/remove.

@user837

questions for the developer

@bertabcd1234 wrote those. I will presume there's no concerns about mesh usage though. Easy enough to add through the mesh and run a test rule.

[sburke781]

@FriedCheese2006

I will presume there's no concerns about mesh usage though. Easy enough to add through the mesh and run a test rule.

I use the proxy for this purpose, doesn't matter what hub the app is connected to.

[bertabcd1234]

@FriedCheese2006

I will presume there's no concerns about mesh usage though

Confirming the above--there's no reason this device can't be used via Hub Mesh (and that's actually one of the reasons I do use it, besides having multiple devices I sometimes want notifications to go to; I'm not sure the "native" mobile app device works over Hub Mesh).