Adding the ability to start at a time from a input_datetime helper with a duration from another input_datetime

[tigers75]

Checklist

• [X] I checked for similar existing requests (both open and closed) before posting.
• [X] My request is generic, other users may benefit from it too.

Proposal

As many people I use an algorithm for watering the garden that corrects the duration based on temperature and rainfall and often runs a sequence of events to start-stop the watering zones. Thus the starting time of the zone s may vary together with the running time. I'd like to use scheduler for this to align with my other scheduled tasks and also using the clean interface. I think this could be useful for others and also for different use cases. So I'd like to have the ability to set a schedule similar to the fixed time we have now, but with the ability to select an input_datetime as the start time and another input_datetime for the duration. I also think that setting a duration after which the entity should be toggled could be a nice general improvement too (but this would be another feature request I assume).

Additional info

Excuse the poor paint skills:

[nielsfaber]

This seems to defeat the whole purpose of scheduler, it is mostly intended to control the time via the card. Why not using a automation instead?

[tigers75]

I admit that the main purpose is to have a clean and uniform interface across all scheduled tasks, of course I can do it with an automation (I am doing this at the moment), but exactly like I could do with an automation the "run at a fixed time" task. Thinking of it anything in scheduler could be made with an automation, but with MUCH more effort, especially for someone not very skilled with automations. I think that the whole scheduling part is really a huge missing part in HA, and this add-in really fills in many holes. Justo to saty, what I miss mainly from my precedent automation system is how easy it was to run a switch for a certain amount of time directly from the switch command window: there was a "turn on/off for X seconds/minutes/hours", now in HA I have to write an automation every time, and I can't ask my wife to do so.

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