I really miss the ability to identify or just define a user in a flow and then share that user between flows.
So for instance if User 1 is initiating Flow A and Flow A is built for the sole purpose of being unique to User 1 I want to be able to access the users list, pick a user (this would be User 1 - since the flow is built for that user) and send that user to another flow trigger.
So from Flow A I trigger Flow B with User (instead of text), so Flow B knows the initiating user.
In Flow B I can then send a push message to that initiating user.
Currently we can only try to identify the initiating user by sending text between flows.
So currently you would send the users name as text between flows.
This requires us to compare the text to a user name using logic in each flow where we want to use the user in some form - and with several users this can result in quite a big branching of the if/else logic each time and in each flow we want to do something user specific - and this seems unnecessarily tedious.
I hope you would be able to add the ability to both add a user as a variable (also using logic where you can match a user) and send a user as a trigger to another flow.
Of course down the line it would be awesome, if you could also create a new type of variable (user list) in which you can add and remove users.
This way you could send notifications to all users in the user list.
Last night I also had chatGPT suggest something similar.
It does make it a bit simpler and will be a decent workaround (for the more advanced users) until we get native support.
A new user in one of the Danish FB Homey groups asked about how he could create a flow that among other things sends a personalised notification to the user that initiated the flow.
I created a demo for him (without using Homeyscript) and even though I just used the native flows (and sent text as flow triggers) his response was like “Wow, this seems complicated!”
And my own flows would definitely be more easy to maintain if we had native support for sending users as triggers.
I REALLY miss the ability to initiate flows using objects (users, flows, devices, groups etc.)!
So I ended up spending the evening yesterday on building a script that lets you do 20% incremental dimming of any light device that supports dimming or any device group with dimmable light devices.
For testing it relies on a variable called TargetDevice - which contains the device ID (which can be either a light device or a group) for it to work.
For normal runs I input the device ID as an argument for the script to ensure there are zero conflicts if more buttons are dimming at the same time.
Now I have a single light flow that I can call from any button/contact and just by assigning the ID of the light/group to the variable before initiating the script I am able to add 20% to any light or any group of lights.
The light dimming is a rotation, so if you dim above 100% it starts back from 1%.
This was created with a lot of back and forth with chatGPT… Now imagine if this was natively supported, where I could choose to initiate a flow using a selectable group, then it would be the easiest thing to select to dim the group in the general lights flow.
For now, though, it works and I am happy with my result - but still miss Athom building in support for initiating flows using selectable objects.
I get it. It really requires that you have the specific need.
Luckily it is not often I have these needs. But this need has actually popped up quite a few times, so yesterday I decided to get it built.
I love that I am now able to easily have ANY button adjust the light output of any light group.
Just call the script via the button with the device ID for the group and that’s it - I can rotate the light output.
I tried building this before and the flow I ended with was very large/complex with a lot of logic checks to determine the new dimming percentage and had to be built (hardcoded) for each light-group.
