nodes that reference history[0].val or history[0].ts not getting the expected data

[VisualReversal]

@lorenwest - For months I've been referencing history[0].val and history[0].ts for a variety of things without issue. Today, I saw that I had an update for node-red-contrib-state, so I updated. After the update all kinds of weird stuff started happening. After some debugging I discovered that I was not getting the expected output from nodes that referenced any global.state variable history[0] data. history[1].val and history[1].ts will work as expected however. After changing all of the effected nodes to either "value" or "timestamp" as appropriate, everything works again as expected.

The other weird thing is that after checking here, the npm site and the node-red flows library I see no recent updates listed. All of my files in /home/pi/.node-red/node_modules/node-red-contrib-state show that they were updated on 8 Dec 2022 at 12:33pm. The current version number is 1.6.1. I didn't pay attention to the previous version number. I keep a pretty good eye on pallet updates and I update often, so I'm totally confused about this. I'm not a programmer; just a home automation enthusiast, so hopefully I'm not making a total fool of myself by bringing this issue up.

[VisualReversal]

So after a bit more tinkering I discovered that the data from history[0].val and "value" weren't always the same. I'm thinking the states either weren't saving to disc or not reading from the disc. Upon further inspection I saw that all of the nodes had the "Saving Interval" in red. Adding a time didn't seem to fix anything. So, I deleted each one and then put it back with the same name. I'm now able to access data from history[0] and that data seems to match the corresponding "value" and "timestamp" information. One odd thing though, there sometimes is a difference in what data shows up based on a restart of node-red vs. a reboot of my raspberry pi.

[NickBorgers]

I think I'm having the same problem as you @VisualReversal. I have loaded my Node Red project using the Projects feature on a new system and am finding my State values are not being persisted to disk. I am going to try recreating them as you describe.

In regards to this

One odd thing though, there sometimes is a difference in what data shows up based on a restart of node-red vs. a reboot of my raspberry pi.

Linux generally performs disk I/O to a cache in RAM. The sync command can be used to force clearing of the Linux disk cache and will block (take time) to complete this action. This would explain seeing less up to date information when rebooting the system if it didn't clear that cache. Restarting node-red itself should keep all of the data because the Linux kernel kept running and so held the unwritten data in RAM for the next read.

[NickBorgers]

Recreating the variable fixed my problem.