The UI is in work so at this point you have to create templates by hand. It’s not super hard and you have two options: YAML or JSON.
YAML
The easiest thing to do is to write it as a rule for testing. Go to the “code” tab and copy the YAML and save it to a “.yaml” file.
Then you need to modify the top part to convert it from a Rule to a Rule Template.
For example, given (I’ve removed most of the rule part for brevity):
configuration:
script: alarm_script
alarmTime: AlarmClock
triggers:
...
conditions: []
actions:
...
replace the “configuration” part the Rule Template information. For example,
uid: rules_tools:alarm_clock
label: Schedules a timer to run a script
description: This will trigger on an update to a DateTime Item and schedule a timer to call another script at the DateTime's state.
configDescriptions:
- name: alarmTime
type: TEXT
context: item
filterCriteria:
- name: type
value: DateTime
label: Alarm Time Item
required: true
description: Item that holds the date and time to run the script.
- name: script
type: TEXT
context: rule
label: Script to Call
required: true
description: The Script or Rule to call at the alarm time.
-
Choose a unique UID. Yannick and Kai use their names as the first part. I use “rules_tools” because I’ve already established an “openhab_rules_tools” repo where I host libraries and will host my rule templates.
-
Create a meaningful label
-
Create a short description of the purpose of the template.
-
configDescriptions is where you define the properties that the user will need to set when creating a new Rule from this template.
-
Modify the triggers, conditions, and actions to use the configs. For the moment it uses ${name} where “name” is the name of the parameter to do the find and replace. However there are problems with that syntax and I don’t know if we have a solution or alternative yet.
Definitely look at the templates already posted to the Marketplace for more examples.
JSON
It’s pretty much exactly the same as the YAML only it uses JSON encoding instead of YAML. When using JSON I recommend writing the rule, querying for it in the REST API to get the JSON (or copy it straight out of the JSONDB files). And as above, replace the top part of the rule with the rule template info and modify the triggers, conditions, and actions to use the configuration parameters.
NOTE: A single field in JSON cannot extend multiple lines which means the code of Script Actions and Script Conditions have to be all on the same line. That makes working with JSON really awkward.
An example JSON formatted template might look like:
{
"uid":"rules_tools:mqtt_eb_online",
"label":"ONLINE Status Publisher",
"description":"Publishes ONLINE as a retained message to the LWT topic.",
"configDescriptions":[
{
"name":"broker",
"type":"TEXT",
"context":"thing",
"label":"MQTT Broker Thing",
"description":"Select the MQTT Broker Thing used for the MQTT Event Bus",
"required":true
},
{
"name":"topicRoot",
"type":"TEXT",
"label":"openHAB Instance Name",
"description":"Name of this openHAB instance, used as the root of the topic structure.",
"required":true
}
],
"triggers": [
{
"id":"1",
"label":"Broker Thing changes to ONLINE",
"description":"",
"configuration": {
"thingUID":"${broker}",
"status":"ONLINE"
},
"type":"core.ThingStatusChangeTrigger"
}
],
"conditions": [],
"actions": [
{
"inputs": {},
"id": "2",
"label":"Publish ONLINE to the LWT topic as retained",
"configuration": {
"type":"application/javascript",
"script":"var Log = Java.type('org.openhab.core.model.script.actions.Log');\nvar topic = '${topicRoot}/status';\nLog.logInfo('MQTT_EB', 'Publishing online message');\nvar mqtt = actions.get('mqtt', '${broker}');\nmqtt.publishMQTT(topic,'ONLINE', true);"
},
"type":"script.ScriptAction"
}
]
}
Again, there are a number of examples already published to the Marketplace. Learn from those.
As far as I can tell right now there is no way to write a rule template locally. You have to create the template, publish it to the Marketplace and then you can select and install it. Remember this is just released and is probably at best an alpha level feature. There is a lot of work left to do.
Ultimately I would expect one could write a JSON file in $OH_CONF/automation and I also expect a UI to be developed. But neither are supported yet.
It’s a copy. If the template changes, one needs to delete and recreate the rule from the template to pick up the changes.
