Core feauture request: APIs to suspend a gateway or binding or thing

Add-ons Bindings
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I would like an enhancement in core binding APIs. Sometime my rule or binding goes spooky. There should be a quick and universal way to disengage all communications with that device from OH. Imagine a clutch in your bike / car.
This can also be useful during hardware maintenance/reconfiguration, we don’t want those rules kicking in and activating devices.
The APIs can also be useful toimplement emergency (911) themes. Like fire, theft, assault, lockdown, locks-open, so that hackers/viruses if any or regular rules couldn’t override the emergency theme for lockdown period.

Currently I implement this in bindings individually. I got a binary channel called “Enabled”. When its OFF, the thing handler discards all updates from device and forbids outgoing commands to that device, from OH side the thing is locked in a given state. The state of that device can still be overriden using physical switch, because not all vendors support this kind of lockdown behavior.

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Also post over on the Eclipse Smarthome Forums as the core APIs are defined over there and that is where the PR would be submitted when you are ready to open the Issue.

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I figured its an ESH level work. But wanted to get opinions from users here.

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I didn’t mean to imply you shouldn’t have posted here too. In fact usually the OH forum will have better feedback and more discussion. :slight_smile:

I don’t write bindings so I don’t really have an opinion. It does seem a kin to the ability to turn on/off Rules in the Experimental Rules Engine (a feature I’m looking forward to) only at a deeper level. It sounds like a good idea but it also sounds like it could be disruptive to the existing architecture so it will need some discussion and buy in.

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