DateTime or Time only triggers - the 'eternal 'alarm clock question

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@Dirk_Albrecht

For some reason, it doesn’t send the command, though. When clicking the tick mark button, the input is reset…

Hmm, it should but I admit I didn’t try it. That might be a bug worth filing (How to file an Issue).

@Dirk_Albrecht

In general, and relating back to this discussion, it would really be great, if I could, within the rule using that Timer Item as a trigger then reference to the name of the (Timer) Item

There is the start of a PR to add this sort of information to event but work on it has stalled. Add event information in rules for time, manual and RunRuleAction trigger by J-N-K · Pull Request #2965 · openhab/openhab-core · GitHub

In the mea time you can use the current time compared to the times in the Items you know can trigger the rule and see which is closest to now. In JS Scripting you could do something like the following (if all the triggering Items are in a Group).

var now = time.toZDT();
var howClose = time.Duration.ofSeconds(1);
var triggeringItems = TimeTriggerItems.members.filter(i => time.toZDT(i).isClose(now, howClose));

if(triggeringItems.length != 1) {
  // if null or zero, not triggered by the Time Items, manual?
  // if > 1 your DateTime Items are too close together in time
}
else {
  var trigger = triggeringItems[0];
}

If you don’t care about error checking it could be a one liner.

Note isClose tests both sides of the date time. So in this case if the time is between one second before to one second after the Item it will return true. But in practice, a rule triggered by a Time trigger won’t run before that time.