Type problems are the number one problem among OH rules writers, be they advanced and experienced or new comers. Anything we can do to manage type problems is a good thing. I’m adding the time utils stuff so no matter what, you are one function call away from having a time.ZonedDateTime so anything, be it the state of an Item, now, or just a disconnected “13:54:00” string, can be used without worrying about type.
On top of that, the openhab-js library has a policy, maybe goal is a better word, to present the users with as pure of an environment as possible. This means converting stuff to JavaScript as much as possible. Given how JS works, just about everything except date times and QuantityType can be handled just by converting the stuff to a String.
However, as soon as you hit a QuantityType, you have to:
- know that you have actually encountered a QuantityType which requires knowledge outside of the rule
- Only use QuantityTypes when working with that value or
- Normalize everything to primitive floats/string
Currently the openhab-js library basically strips the units off the QuantityTypes by default, giving you just a string of the number. That is not a satisfactory solution. Forcing the end users to have to use QuantityTypes directly every time they encounter one to even do a comparison is also not satisfactory. I’d prefer to get to a point that the library makes reasonable assumptions when it encounters a QuantityType in one operand and a primitive JS float or string in the other.
For example, if I compare a QuantityType kWh to a "naked’ JS number, automatically assume that the naked number is the same units as the QuantityType and do all the conversion in the background.
As another example, provide a syntax where one can more easily define a constant QuantityType like is available in Rules DSL (e.g. items.getItem('MyKwhItem').state < "123 kWh"; (unfortunately that specific syntax isn’t possible so I’m looking for alternatives) as opposed to items.getItem('MyKwhItem).rawState < new QuantityType('123 kWh')); with the caveat that QuantityType would need to be imported separately).
We both know QuantityTypes are both awesome and super powerful and at the same time a huge pain to work with and a major hangup for users experienced and new. Heck, it’s even a pain for some of the binding developers to deal with. My hope is to find a way to ease some of that pain similarly to how I’m doing for DateTime types.
If I can free the end users from needing to worry too much about type with QuantityTypes, then I’ll have made it so that the end users don’t usually need to worry about type at all any more. The library will make reasonable assumptions or provide dead simple conversion functions for every case. Docs will become simpler and end users will encounter fewer surprises. Win win win! 