As my HE has grown - it's becoming unmanageable.
Specifically, I cant tell anymore what is going to happen when an event occurs.
I'd love to see a flow chart.
Switch A gets thrown. that event causes things to occur. but what? maybe some rules kick off? which rules? what order?
Those rules cause other events. which trigger other rules. which trigger other rules. then an activation happens - and causes ...
It'd be awesome if rules weren't a giant mess - or at least a mess I could comprehend. SUre. I can hear the yells - look at the logs!. and I dig through 1000 info statements from 10 devs who use differing log configurations which don't tell me anything useful to the original event I wish I understood.
IBM used to have a really nice, easy for laymens way to trace the result of a triggered switch. HE needs it too.
I think the question is how much of this information is available easily. In many cases if you have an event that you known then there are ways to find the affected devices. I wouldn't say just look at the logs. If you know a devices involved with the event you can also open up that devices and look at the events for it and that can help you identify the rule and then from there you can figure out all that happened.
If all the information is available this could be a community app project to create a flow diagram for what you are talking about. Not sure how crazy that would be, but doesn't seem impossible.
Given the wealth of applications and integrations, the ability to generate a flow chart automatically for every defined interaction is not something that the platform lends itself to. Documenting every application or integration that a device could be affected by (just because device may be "selected" doesn't mean it is used) is possible at some level, but can fails at the child app level depending on how the parent-child application maintains the device interaction - i.e. webCoRE, I can definitely extract every device that the parent app has been granted access for, but determining with 100% certainty what devices a particular piston may use at this point appears unachievable.
If you back track the events that a device records you could eventually develop some additional understanding but would miss any trigger that did not occur in the timeframe examined.
I have a big notebook that I made with descriptions of all my rules, little flow charts, definitions for modes and variables, etc. my wife has to have SOME way to figure it all out if I die tomorrow.
Don't discount the value of Visual Rules Builder, then, which in theory could accommodate the entirety of your hub's workflow. It is intrinsically... visual so no additional flowchart needed. This built-in app doesn't get much mention in the Forum, but is still being actively developed.
With a little ingenuity, you might even be able to print VRB rules for safekeeping in a notebook.
I feel your pain. Believe me. I keep an Excel spreadsheet, but it's unwieldy. Visual Rules doesn't really cut it because my RM rules tend to be more complex.
One thing I found helpful is the app Rule References Rule Table. At least it gives me a quick way to see what rules are referencing other rules — with links and rule app numbers.
