6 - A brief interlude

We already have the logic to build this component - it's already contained within the .Guard state we created earlier. All we need to do is identify which parts of it we need to expose to whoever might want to use this component in the future.

That's pretty simple too - we have two:

• The duration of the delay before switching state.
• The state to switch to.

So we put together our new component (Component_Instruction_State_Timeout).

{
  "Type": "Component",
  "Class": "Instruction",
  "Parameters": {
    "_ImportStates": ["Main"],
    "Delay": {
      "Value": [3, 5],
      "Description": "The amount of time to wait before transitioning"
    }
  },
  "Content": {
    "Continue": true,
    "ActionsBlocking": true,
    "Actions": [
      {
        "Type": "Timeout",
        "Delay": { "Compute": "Delay" }
      },
      {
        "Type": "ParentState",
        "State": "Main"
      }
    ]
  }
}

The logic here should be very familiar - the only difference is that we've added and described the parameters in the Parameters block, and now use a ParentState action to signify that this is going to use one of the _ImportedStates from the template itself.

If we would update the template and replace the Timeout block with it, it would look like this, for example, in the Sleep state.

{
  "Sensor": {
    "Type": "State",
    "State": "Sleep"
  },
  "Instructions": [
    {
      "Reference": "Component_Instruction_State_Timeout",
      "Modify": {
        "_ExportStates": ["Idle.Default"],
        "Delay": [30, 45]
      }
    }
  ]
}

We won't replace this everywhere in the tutorial just yet, but we'll use this knowledge to replace even more code with components.