I don’t know if it’s me but I struggle a lot with finding the right topics on the “community” site.
I Started with OH3 and don’t use textual (file) based configuration, I try to do it all within the OH3 UI. If I don’t understand how I can solve a issue I go to the Community site but if try to find the related help or discussion it ends very often in solutions in textual (file) based configurations.
Is there a way to filter the topics that only show OH3 UI related solutions without the textual (file) solutions?
In the documentation it is stated:
Blockquote
When using the UI method you will notice that most configuration screens will have a “Code” tab. If you run into problems or want to share something that you’ve created through the UI, click on the “Code” tab and post that YAML to the forum ( using code fences (opens new window)) instead of, or in addition to using screen shots.
Whilst it is possible to mix the two, for example use the UI for things and files for items, doing this is not recommended as it increases complexity
Blockquote
So I hoped that the topics in the community were also split (but somehow connected with tags).
I don’t want to offend anyone in the community as it is of great value right now. It maybe just my unknowing how to filter only OH3 UI related topics or an opportunity for improvement.
Can you say what difficulty you have with this? Text or GUI configuration yields up the same results, the Item or Thing. It doesn’t seem too difficult to “read” a text Item or Thing definition example and “translate” into a GUI entry, but maybe it is.
I tried to push for people to be diligent on this but it’s all but impossible. And you have situations where someone posts a UI solution and another person posts a jRuby solution on the same thread. What’s the topic to be tagged with then? Who is responsible for adding the proper tag?
It’s simply not feasible to do. We don’t have enough people to come behind every post and correct the tags and categories and clearly we cannot rely on the original posters to do so on their own.
But, as @rossko57 and @denominator say, it’s all dealing with the same openHAB concepts. Items defined in the UI are no different from Items defined in a text file. They look the same, behave the same, and have the same fields and properties. The same goes for Things, Rules and all the rest. So, just because you come across a topic that only shows a solution in a text based way doesn’t mean it’s useless to a UI user (unless they are trying cargo cult programming in which case UI verses text based is going to be the least of your problems). You may just need to pull up the reference docs a couple of times to get the mapping between the fields and understand the syntax.
I wish we could offer more but that’s the best we can do right now.
Thanks for the feedback.
As mentioned “I don’t want to offend anyone in the community” but I strongly believe that continues improvement is the way forward. That’s why I started the discussion on the documentation structure as a end-user.
I understand that there is a lack of resources to restructure it but maybe it’s an idea for the future.
OH is build by verry smart guys and that is super and great. But the pitfall is that they could be “to smart” to explain it to the “less smart people” that have less or even no programming skills.
kind regards,
Marco
