Using beta app BUG(?) to my advantage

Normally, when you set up a Notification for a motion sensor, handheld remote, door lock, or other device, with…:

Devices > [Device] > ► > Notifications > Add notification for: [Whenever... ]

…you then name that Notification, which momentarily appears listed below along with a Trashcan icon in case you change your mind and want to delete it.

Unbeknownst to many Vera users, that “Notification” is used by Vera to create an invisible “Scene” which does not appear in any Room or any other part of the UI.

Until now! With the latest revisions of the beta VeraMobile™ app, those hidden Scenes suddenly became visible in the app, giving users the ability to (a) become aware (at least be reminded) of its existence, (b) rename it, (c) edit the Scene, and (d) assign it to a Room.

While this sounds like an academic distinction – after all, these Notifications were never intended to view/edit/move, just to run when needed – the fact is, users like to have control over such things. I know I do. And I don’t really care to wonder why a certain Notification got triggered a decade later (not an exaggeration!) when, say, a certain device’s “Battery Goes Low” triggered it.

So I’ve capitalized on this “bug” in the app to move all those old Notifications into a new Room (which I call “_Notifications”) and carefully edit them as needed, deleting unneeded or obsolete ones, and (in most cases) create a Reactor routine that accomplishes the same purpose (often using its ‘Notify’ > SMTP feature).

BOBUS Along the way, I unearthed yet another interesting glitch; namely, that Vera doesn’t consider these valid Scenes insofar as (a) they do not possess an actual Trigger (“Manual” is not offered as an option during editing!); and, (b) they don’t have any Actions assigned (i.e. no Lua code nor any Devices checked!), so you’re forced to accommodate these omissions somehow before being allowed to Save edits.

I dare say, without the beta app and these undocumented “glitches” I would have a hard time (re)discovering old Notifications that I created years ago and completely forgotten about!

  • Libra

These notification scenes are tagged with a “hidden” attribute and are actually accessible through ALTUI… I had manipulated them years ago and even created my own notifications with lua code… until I found the mios too unreliable and migrated my notifications to pushover and killed the connection between the vera and the mios servers altogether since they also were causing the vera to reload.

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Pray tell, how would the average user alter the “hidden” attribute, or even find these items to begin with? And just how are these Scenes being triggered?

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The scenes are called, not triggered. The luup engine calls them whenever their specific events occur.
ALTUI shows all the hidden stuff when using the “table” menu. It shows the hidden scenes and devices.
There you can also see device 1 being the zwave dongle, device 5 is the zigbee etc…

I posted this I think in the old forum. When you link your vera to an account, the vera gets a user ID which corresponds to your user account on the vera server and links to your mobile app. Using this ID you can use lua code or an url to call a notification and make it say whatever you want.

This is one of the main advantages of ALTUI. You get access to a more advanced menu showing all the attributes and variables from your user-data which UI7 hides.

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Thus I move yet another step closer to installing and using AltUI. :smiley:

I further observe that these formerly hidden Notifications thus become visible to Alexa as well, and that certain ones remain even after the associated Device has been removed from Vera! AND that it’s impossible to tell (unless you happened to include its name in the Notification title) which Device each was intended for.

BUGS #2, #3 and #4 in my book.

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haha found it!

over 2 years later, I note that this notification mechanism is grossly insecure and anyone could get a kick out of spamming the notification server sending users all kinds of notifications… I am just saying…

Heck my own local API for notification is more secure than this!

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