A way to self-document automation

Question

Currently, When making automations there is no Description Field or similar to describe/document what is being accomplished by each individual step, only for the automation as a whole.

For longer automations with dozens of steps/actions/conditions and multiple branches, this can make things hard to follow, and hard for later developers/admins to troubleshoot. This would be ESPECIALLY useful in the Send web request action and other advanced actions.

Is there an addon or any way to go about adding a text area/paragraph to automation steps/actions?

Bill Sheboy · Accepted Answer

Hi @Jefferson young

Short answer: no.

There is a suggestion to add REST API functions for automation rules, making it is easier to automatically backup/document them, put them under source control, etc.: https://codebarrel.atlassian.net/browse/AUT-999  I believe there are other suggestions to add in-line comments to rules.

There are some community discussions on this topic of rule management, and a couple of ideas are:

* in your rule, add writes to the audit log to describe what is happening
* export your rules, and capture print screens, and then document them in Confluence or another location

Kind regards,
Bill