Help, I'm ready to give up

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@juelicher

Main issue with openHAB is the lack of “forgiveness” of the rule language regarding undefined elements and type casting. I have quite a few rules where are more testings if a value is undefined and typecasts than actual code.

There are ways to deal with this sort of thing:

1. Use Designer to catch syntax errors for you
2. Use persistence with restoreOnStartup to avoid the NULLs
3. Make use of the ? operator for a quick test for null

if(timers.get("foo") != null) timers.get("foo").cancel

can be replaced with

timers.get("foo")?.cancel

4. Make use of Groups
5. be aware that OH 2 is a lot better at handling casts for your so you rarely need to do something like if(MyItem.state as DecimalType > 20) any longer.

With the above I find I have no more tests than I do in any other not strongly typed language such as Python or JavaScript.