Combining paper UI and Eclipse smart home designer

[skatun (Kim Skatun)]

Coming from OH1 runtime to OH2 6 months ago I have some basic questions.

I started to use the Paper UI to install all bindings I need, where is this info stored? I would like to backup the settings to a text file so that I can easily reinstall my setup, copy part of it over to new RPI.

I like to keep all my items in separate files, netatmo.items, heatings.items , until now I have never used things, mainly because neither GPIO or netatmo 1.9 binding does not allow this. But now I would like follow http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/beginner/configuration.html to add cellphone tracking. However I would like the items to be added presence.items file where I have all my motion and camera items in order to keep all items that belongs together together. So how should I do this?

What is the description tag I see on my items in the paper UI? (I never defined items in the paper UI.)

How can you add new files in the eclipse smart home designer without create files outside it and then reopen it.

I think these questions should be described somehow in the tutorial: http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html

side note:
Currently I only backup up my samba share of the openhab-conf folder once in a while to my google drive, is it somehow possible to sync this automatically?

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@skatun

I started to use the Paper UI to install all bindings I need, where is this info stored?

The bindings themselves are stored in userdata/cache. I’m sure there are some other things located in other places.

Backup and restore for apt-get is documented here. If you have a manual install, look in the installation instructions for your platform for backup and restore instructions.

An alternative approach would be to use services/addons.cfg to select the addons to install instead of PaperUI. This is described in the Migration Tutorial here:

http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html#text-based

@skatun

However I would like the items to be added presence.items file where I have all my motion and camera items in order to keep all items that belongs together together. So how should I do this?

Create your Items as normal and in the { } part of the Item definition put channel=channelid where channel id is the ID of the channel on the Thing. One way to find this ID is to browse to the Thing in PaperUI > Configuration > Things and you will see the list of available channels.

@skatun

What is the description tag I see on my items in the paper UI?

Don’t know, I don’t use PaperUI for Items. I suspect it is part of a feature that is not yet fully implemented.

@skatun

How can you add new files in the eclipse smart home designer without create files outside it and then reopen it.

<ctrl>-n

Make sure to have the folder where you want the new file to go selected in the file tree on the left.

@skatun

I think these questions should be described somehow in the tutorial: http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html

Backup and restore is beyond the scope of the Migration Tutorial I think, particularly since it is already documented in pages the Migration Tutorial explictely links to. But if you disagree, add an issue to the openhab-docs github.

Linking Items to OH 2 Things is documented in the tutorial here:

http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html#linking-channels-to-items

Like backup and restore, useage of ESHD is beyond the scope of the Migration Tutorial and
Use of ESH Designer, and in particular how to create a new file is documented here:

http://docs.openhab.org/installation/designer.html#usage

I will open an issue to change the links to Designer in the Migration tutorial to point to the above page instead of the ESH Desginer download page.

Also, the <ctrl>n key combo is not new. It was how one created a new file in the old openHAB 1 Designer as well.

@skatun

Currently I only backup up my samba share of the openhab-conf folder once in a while to my google drive, is it somehow possible to sync this automatically?

I’m sure one could write a script. The Google Drive API is not that hard to work with. There is no way I know of to do it in openHAB short of installing the Google Drive program and creating a cron job to automatically copy the conf folder to the Google Drive watch folder.