Best practice for pausing alerts/reminders: disable flow or use variable?

Flows
1

I have some flows that basically are a bit extended way to determine whether I should get a message about something on my phone. (no other critical functions). I want to include pause options, allowing me to determine (f.e. using the Confirm card) if I don’t want to receive new messages for a certain amount of time. What is best practice:

  • Use a combination of disable/enable flow cards
  • Use some sort of DoNotSent variable in the flow

On the one hand, using Disable/Enable flow cards in flows seems a bit crude. On the other hand, it also seems the most efficient because the flow will not use any resources until enabled again.

2

I think it doesn’t really matter which one you pick. I’d go for enabling and disabling the Flows, since it’s the least work to implement

3

Take a look at the “no repeat window” card from the FLOWBITS app.

It has many more cards that help to simplify flows.

4

I think it is more of what you like than if there is a real best practice.

I use a flow that i manually start which sets a variable to disable for 30 minutes before it sets it back to enable. This variable is used in another flow (if variable is set to disable than..)

It works for me, I don’t like disabling flows who should work (I only disable them for archiving or if I know I won’t use the flow for a longer time period).

5

In my opinion, why create another boolean, if the boolean already exists?
You can create a variable, and then in your flow check for the value of that boolean and only continue when the value is true, but simply disabling the flow does the same thing without any extra logic.
KISS.

Also, boolean variables are global, while a disabled flow is only scoped to that flow. This reduces the chances of accidental side effects, or wrong booleans being changed.

But there’s also a third way that i often utilize. If a flow only needs to be disabled based on logic from other flows, i simply disable the flow.
If there could be human interaction to enable or disable flows, i use a virtual device. This will give a nice user interface for everyone in the household to understand. You can make a virtual device by enabling the virtual device experiment from the settings. You can then create a virtual device for any flow that you want to enable/disable. Then simply check for the value of that virtual device in your flow.