Best way to make long time macro

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@milkProvider

1. Can I interrupt / cancel rule when it is being executed for case it has Thread::sleep function?

No. Instead of using a long sleep, try something like:

Design Pattern: Cancel Activity

See Design Pattern: What is a Design Pattern and How Do I Use Them Problem Statement Occasionally one has a long running rule that includes a while or for loop to slowly adjust an Item or Items until some criteria is reached. For example, implementing the gradual dimming of a light or flashing of a strobe light in an alarm. However, because these rules are long running one often wants to have the option of cancelling the rule before it reaches the end state (e.g. target dimming value is reached…

@milkProvider

How to perform a rule when habmin button is pressed? (it would start my macro)

Create an unbound Switch and a Rule that gets triggered when that switch is pressed.

See:

Design Pattern: Unbound Item (aka Virtual Item)

Problem Statement Sometimes one needs to create a flag, control, switch, or some other control that is not bound to a device or channel. For example, a Switch to override presence detection. Concept Create an Item that does not have a binding configuration. Simple Example Switch VirtualItem "label" <icon> (groups) // No binding config See the Sensor Aggregation Design Pattern for a more complicated example. The Virtual Item is Override_Presence in that example. Advantages and Limitations V…

@milkProvider

I would like to pass one parameter to rule. I need it to pass amount of minuts for each section of watering system that should be run (in case the macro button is pressed)

Store the value in an Item. You cannot pass parameters to Rules directly

You might find the following informative:

Samples Rules

Note the above is a 1.x version set of rules and will need slight modifications to work in OH 2.x.

Here is an approach I wrote up a long time ago that I just rewrote as a Design Pattern which might be helpful:

Design Pattern: Cascading Timers

Please see Design Pattern: What is a Design Pattern and How Do I Use Them. This Design Pattern is a revisitation of a solution I wrote up here. Problem Statement There are many situations where one needs to cause a series of activities to take place in sequence with the option of being able to cancel the sequence of activities and be able to control how long each step takes to complete. One common use case is for controlling an irrigation system that consists of more than one zone. Concept …

And a few other comments:

• “macro” is not a term of use in the Rules DSL. We have Rules, Scripts, and lambdas. From your later posts, you seem to be referring to lambdas. Using the same terms will help us understand your questions better.

@milkProvider

1. Is it forbidden to call function from timer?

No, but unfortunately error reporting from within lambdas is not very good. Almost any error would cause that log entry. The problem could be one of syntax (I’m not sure the Rules Language supports for loops with that syntax for example). The best thing to do is load the rule up in ESH Desginer 0.8 and see if it finds any syntax errors. Then add a try catch around the entire body of your lambda and log out what exception is actually being thrown.

@milkProvider

2. Does createTimer makes another thread or it is recursion in this case?

It does neither. It adds a lambda to the Timer thread to be executed at a later date.

@milkProvider

It seems like global lambda function / another global VARs are reachable ONLY directly from “rule” body (the exceptions are items).

That is correct. Furthermore, lambdas are only available to the rules in that .rules file.

@milkProvider

That is why I couldnt call (startTmpSpringler function is null within lambda function):
startTmpSpringler.apply(pItems, pTimes, pIndex+1)

You could pass the lambda to itself as a function argument if that is what you really wanted to do. I highly recommend applying some of what is in my links above though for a much easier and cleaner solution.

@milkProvider

and couldnt assign global timer inside lambda function:

Also correct. A lambda can only access what is available from the context in which it was created. A global lambda has no context so cannot access anything except Items and what is passed to it as an argument.

@milkProvider

I would really like to see any workaround for this or explanation how items are initialized that they can be globally reached

Items are globally reachable. But global vals and vars are only available to Rules from within the same .rules file they are defined. And lambdas only have access to what gets passed to them.

Finally, coding rules where you need these sorts of accesses and passing of things around will only give you hours of frustration, excessively lengthy, complicated, and brittle code that is very difficult to maintain and update. I highly recommend looking through the links above and the Design Pattern examples to find alternaitve, approaches that use the features of OH and the Rules language.