Help with rule not triggering

[Justin_Leonard]

I have a simple rule that doesn’t seem to be triggering upon the changing of a device attribute. Any idea what could be wrong?

Hubitat event triggered at 10:12 AM

Here’s the rule

Here’s the rule log as of 10:16 AM

[josh]

Logically, it does seem like it should have triggered based on that event but I wonder if the 0 is getting implicitly converted. When viewing the logs, you can expand the filters drop down and check the Debug option which will show you events that loosely match the trigger scope, but didn’t trigger the rule. (eg. matched thing+attribute, but the value didn’t pass the trigger condition)

Have you tried a different ‘not’ value like “PLACEHOLDER”? I suspect the 0 is implicitly getting converted to a number and the comparison fails.

[Justin_Leonard]

Thanks! Debug info indeed revealed that to be the issue. I changed the rule trigger condition to a string “null” and that seems to have done the trick. Is there any particular reason that there’s no option to trigger a rule when an attribute’s value changes, no matter what it changes to?

[josh]

@Justin_Leonard

Is there any particular reason that there’s no option to trigger a rule when an attribute’s value changes, no matter what it changes to?

Not really. It looks like there’s a feature request that just never gained any traction:

Rules engine - add generic "change" event

Triggers should have a “changes” event. Currently, you need to have workarounds for each variable type (boolean is true or boolean is false, etc). A more general event would streamline and simplify workflow. Today… [2020-12-22_11-36-26] Tomorrow… '$ShadesHold changes".