node-red-contrib-chronos 1.24

[jensrossbach]

Welcome to the new release 1.24 of node-red-contrib-chronos! Besides some bug fixes and small improvements, it contains the following highlights:

Temporarily suspend automatic state changes

With the new input message commands "pause" and "repeat", it is possible to temporarily suspend automatic state changes. This can for instance be used in combination with manual states to avoid that the state node automatically switches away from such a state.

Example

Let's assume you want to model an alarm system and have the three states HOME, NIGHT and AWAY. The states HOME and NIGHT are activated at specific times (e.g., 6 o' clock in the morning for the HOME state and 11 o'clock in the evening for the NIGHT state) and the state AWAY is a manual state that you only activate on demand when you leave your house. Now, in order to prevent that the AWAY state is deactivated automatically in the evening (or morning, depending on when you activated it), you can send the "pause" command right after the "set" command that activated the AWAY state. Once you arrive back at your home, you can send the "resume" command to continue with automatic state changes and the "reset" command to restore the appropriate time-based state.

Enhanced external input

Now, more nodes, in particular the scheduler, state and repeat nodes support the basic and extended external input formats (limited to time-only values for scheduler and state node, however) to simplify providing date/time values from external sources like environment variables, context variables or message properties. Repeat and delay nodes now support arbitrary message properties as additional external source for custom repetition data, until time and custom delay data.

Change time zone

The time change node now provides the possibility to change the time zone or the offset to the universal time for the target's local time as part of the convert rule. This is of course optional and if not used, as before, the time zone configured in the associated configuration node is applied.

Scheduler node optimizations

The scheduler node has been optimized concerning resource usage by reducing the number of concurrently running timers. Now, only a single timer for the next upcoming event is started instead of one timer per enabled event. If there are multiple events with the same trigger time, all those events will be triggered by the single timer instance.

Additionally, the usage of the Node-RED event flows:started for delaying next event messages after node start until flows have been set up has been removed and replaced by a fixed delay that is customizable and by default 0.1 seconds. Reason is that this event is an undocumented internal Node-RED event that shouldn't be used by nodes as it can be removed/changed at any time and also has some restrictions related to maximum number of concurrently allowed event listeners. The fixed delay is optional and is used for any message being sent directly after start of the node.