A recipe knows almost everything about the automation it makes. What it cannot
know is where your gear is: which machine runs QLab, which Companion button,
how long the aux timer should run. Handing the user the full automation form
to supply three of those made them read a form of twenty fields to change one.
A recipe now declares its parameters, and picking one asks for those and
nothing else. Create makes the automation and its trigger through the same
endpoints the form uses, so what lands in the list is an ordinary automation
with nothing special about it.
Each recipe carries a `build` function rather than a literal, which is what
lets the answers reach the outputs — a Companion address and a page, row and
column become one URL. That also absorbs the two things a user does without
thinking: an address pasted with a trailing slash, and a webhook URL that
already carries a query string. Every default still points at loopback.
For the list to hold many recipes it has to be searchable and grouped, so it
is both. Search matches the title, the description, the category and a
keywords list, so the Companion recipe answers to "stream deck" and "elgato"
and QLab answers to "osc" and "audio". Enter takes the top result. Escape
clears the search rather than closing the dialog, which is the behaviour the
settings search already has.
The picker and the parameter step are two views of one dialog rather than two
stacked modals, so Back means back rather than dismissing everything. Rows
carry only the lifecycle tag: with many recipes, the description and one tag
is what stays readable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AfDKsy6PE3Rbyt32Fg4YKf
Making an automation took two visits to two lists. You wrote the automation
in one, then remembered that an automation alone never runs, went to the
trigger list, made a trigger, and pointed it back at what you had just made.
A first time user who stopped after the first step got a thing that looked
finished and did nothing.
Lifecycles are now picked on the automation form, as chips. Saving reconciles
the triggers behind it, diffed against a snapshot taken when the form opened
so a save never removes a trigger the user could not see. Every lifecycle is
in one place, including the two that fire continuously, which say so before
you pick them rather than after your log fills up.
That leaves the trigger list as what it actually is: a place to rename a
generated trigger, or to point several differently named ones at the same
automation. It says so, and it names the triggers whose automation is gone.
New opens one list of starting points: an empty automation, then a handful of
recipes for the software people actually pair Ontime with. A recipe is
nothing but a pre-filled form, so choosing one opens the ordinary automation
form with its values in place. The user reads what it will do, points it at
their own gear and saves. Nothing is written until they do, and there is no
second creation path to keep working: one request, the same as any other
automation. Every recipe targets loopback, so one saved without thinking
cannot put traffic on a venue network.
The list now answers what an automation does without opening it: when it
runs, whether it filters, and what it sends. An automation with no trigger or
no output is the common half-finished state and is called out rather than
shown as a blank cell. Outputs are cards with their type, a summary and a
Test button in the header, which is also where the test says whether it
worked: the panel used to send and tell the user nothing either way.
Deleting confirms first and names the triggers that go with it, instead of
dumping the server's refusal into a stray row under the table.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AfDKsy6PE3Rbyt32Fg4YKf
Claude