Designing automations to be robust to errors/exceptions in actions

@naumz wrote:

First time poster here. I recently setup HA on a Raspberry PI and have had a lot of fun with it. As I create more automations, I was curious about different ways to design automations to be robust to errors/exceptions in actions.

This came to my mind because a recent update changed the behavior of the Roku integration on my TCL TV to raise Connection errors when the current state is standby (https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/36094). I dealt with it by using a service_template with an explicit condition on the state and using a noop script with 0 delay in the else statement ({% if ... elif ... else %} with no else - what do you do?).

I also read about creating a separate script with the action that is likely to throw an error so the main automation doesn’t fail.

The first approach requires knowing the exact state that may cause an error, and the second one doesn’t but requires splitting it out into a separate file.

Are there other/recommended ways of achieving a similar outcome?

For reference, here is the relevant part of my original automation:

- id: '1588671360892'
  alias: Play Youtube video
  description: Play Youtube video at a certain time
  trigger:
  - platform: template
    value_template: '{{ as_timestamp(states(''sensor.date_time_iso'')) == as_timestamp(states(''sensor.sunset_time''))
      }}'
  action:
  - data:
      is_volume_muted: true
    entity_id: media_player.living_room_tv
    service: media_player.volume_mute
  - entity_id: media_player.living_room_tv
    service: media_player.media_play_pause
  - data_template:
      volume_level: '{{''0.4'' if now().hour >= 21 else ''0.6''}}'
    entity_id: media_player.bedroom_speaker
    service: media_player.volume_set
  - data:
      entity_id: media_player.bedroom_speaker
      media_content_id: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ
      media_content_type: music
    service: media_extractor.play_media
  - data:
      is_volume_muted: false
    entity_id: media_player.bedroom_speaker
    service: media_player.volume_mute
  - delay: 00:03:25
  - data:
      volume_level: '0.4'
    entity_id: media_player.bedroom_speaker
    service: media_player.volume_set
  - delay: 00:00:10
  - entity_id: media_player.living_room_tv
    service: media_player.media_play_pause
  - data: {}
    entity_id: media_player.living_room_tv
    service: media_player.volume_up

This is what I had to change the specific action section to:

  - entity_id: media_player.living_room_tv
    service_template: "{% if states('media_player.living_room_tv') != 'standby' %}\n\
      \  media_player.media_play_pause\n{% else %}\n  script.noop\n{% endif %}\n"

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