What is the purpose of "Set Action Timeout" in a Pause action?

Questions & Suggestions
1

What is the purpose of "Set Action Timeout" in a Pause action? This seems like circular logic. A user specified pause length would seem to have no need for a timeout, so why does the timeout option in a pause action even exist? Or maybe there is a subtlety to how pause actions work that I don't understand.

To be clear, I'm not talking about "pause until" actions. I get why timeouts can be useful in a pause until action. But I'm not talking about pause until actions. I'm only asking pause actions.

2

I don't know. Good question. But I notice that you didn't ask why it can fail. I'm guessing that it can fail because the value in the duration box could be a variable that doesn't evaluate to a number.

3

I'm asking about the action timeout. That is all.

4

I fully understand. I admitted I didn't know the answer. I just thought my comment was slightly relevant for others who may read this.

5

No worries. I'm just trying to avoid getting sidetracked right out of the gate. So action timeout is what I would like to discuss first.

6

Sure! And I don't know the answer. It may be an oversight in the design of the action. But it's harmless.

7

I'm not convinced it's harmless or an oversight. So I'd like to hear why the timeout exists in the Pause action.

8

Here is the Pause Action:
image

You can see the input field accepts a Calculation, so it's not inconceivable that you won't know how long the pause will be until the macro containing the action actually runs.

Maybe like this:
image

Therefore it may be that the result of the calculation could be way longer than you actually want, in which case you can use the Timeout value in the gear menu to set a limit on the actual maximum time you want to pause for as a safety measure for example.

Apologies if my explanation is not very clear, but it's the best I can do late on a Friday evening :wink:

9

You got me wondering if all calculations would take the exact same amount of time, or could some take longer than others. After pondering, I realized that the ternary operator probably takes a different amount of time for different input values. Here's an example of a calculation that would take a variable amount of time. This could cause timeouts depending on the values of a, b, c, d and e. This could be considered the purpose of a timeout in a pause action. It's not a very practical purpose, but it's there.

a=b ? 1 : b=c ? 2 : c=d ? 3 : d=e ? 4 : 5

10

Tiffle/Airy,

Yeah, I think both of you seem to have come up with a good reason why the timeout action exists.

For my purposes, which is just a simple pause, using a number in seconds or hundredths of seconds, I don't really have to worry about this stuff, it would seem, so I think I could just leave the timeout set to 99 hours (or whatever it is) and then set my pause for 0.5 seconds or whatever, and be good to go.

But I've been having some issues in a macro that I'm trying to sort out, and the issues maybe seemed to be tied to my use of pauses, so I was trying to get to the bottom of the problem.

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11

If you still have a problem you just have to ask as there's lots of helpful people here!