Is there a way to spawn multiple instances of a subflow from a single sequence?

[erktrek]

Have been using NR very successfully in conjunction with the Hubitat Elevation smart hub for the past year or so. Have been overwhelmed by the awesomeness of the NR platform + HE community developed nodes..

One aspect of my home automation system is to create some sequences for home or away. In order to do this I am using the "node-red-contrib-presence-faker" node. This node sets some randomized timing for execution which I can configure and control through messages - it allows me to have lights/devices whatever turn on/off on a semi-random timer. Unfortunately for my purposes I want have to have a PF node for each device rather than a group of them. I can do this the manual way of course but it starts to get rather unwieldy the more HE device nodes I add.

I would like to be able to create a subflow and pass in a list of devices and then loop through said list and separately instantiate the PF node for each device. I've got enough experience to handle the looping/parsing etc so am not worried about that bit.

My question is - does the subflow do this already, instantiate separate PF nodes based on each message in the loop or do they get overwritten/replaced each time? I have looked at the docs and am unclear about that in terms of nodes.

If it does get overwritten is there a way to dynamically instantiate nodes in a subflow or dynamically generate multiple instances of a subflow in a sequence?

Any thoughts would be appreciated...

[erktrek]

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[Steve-Mcl]

Each subflow is an instance of whatever you have inside.

If you have one instance of the subflow you have one pf node. If you have 2 instances of your subflow, you effectively have 2 lots of whatever is inside (i.e. 2 pf nodes).

Unless the pf node supports dynamically creatable multiple schedules, it won't be possible either in or out of a subflow.

There are potentially other solutions but will require some work on your part. For example, the cron-plus node supports as many schedules as you wish and is 100% programmable/dynamic - but you would need to handle the variance of things (e.g. if you want an output at 7:30 +/- 30 mins, you'd have to set the schedule for 7:15 with a 30min random delay) but it is definitely possible to achieve what you're asking. (note I don't use nor do I know what this pf node does so there is some speculation on my part)

[erktrek]

Thanks for the heads up. Yeah thats kind of what I figured. Your idea about cron-plus is an interesting one - I have used it for other things so will explore a little further...