Idea for Openhab 3: Auto sitemap generation with 'display as' templates

Love this concept

I see sitemaps as being redundant. I’m surprised there’s not more push for HabPanel, it’s the only UI that looks great and has immense flexibility that put’s it on par with other systems. Sitemaps are very primitive looking which might be OK for extremely basic setups but I personally don’t even have a site map file defined.

HabPanel all the way!

Yes Habpanel is great IF you have the time to spend getting it right, you can tweak for hours and get exactly what you want which is great for some people, we all have our own concepts and ways we prefer…

Some people may prefer to use Habpanel for a clean simple and stripped back set of controls, yet have a complex set of controls in another format for playing and tweaking the setup. An example of this is I have over 15 lights all individually controllable in the same room, image how ugly and scary a full set of controls for all these lights in a habpanel setup would look.

I want to have the full set of controls for playing with setting up my scenes, getting the look right and then saving this scene to a single button on my wall and voice control.

I completely agree it is a hidden gem that more people should play with.

Are you using Habpanel on your phone? It seemed great for tablets but it didn’t seem like it scaled down all that well to phone displays? I haven’t really used it beyond playing since I have no wall mounted tablets.

Yes, i use it constantly. You need to create a responsive CSS theme

Which is why habpanel isnt great, in my opinion. Either one need to learn css, or habpanel is really bad in basic use. It would be alot more usefull if there were templates build in (with css templates as well).
I use it though, but thats for svg´s only. Ofcouse this require some css as well.

It would be alot more usefull if there were templates build in (with css templates as well)

Fully agree. I like habpanel a lot but it gaves me a hard live to build / customize it in a way computer, tablet and mobile get a usable interface. As workaround I’m using the Basic UI via app on the mobile.

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Many wonderful CSS themes on the forum you can build upon though?

Agreed, but these are custom build, and some arent really that easy unless you already know alot.
What I was suggesting was a package included in Habpanel. As it is now, you got two options. Either nothing, or use a custom/build your own.

Plenty of freelancers that can help with CSS for very low cost.

Well, then I dont really need to bother with anything, cause I got money :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
Honestly, it´s a very strange answer, as I thought the idea was how to improve things. Not to move less optimal stuff from one place to another.

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Good things generally aren’t easy. What I’m saying is if it’s too hard and your ok to spend a little money why not get help if you’re unwilling to learn a little css.

If your unwilling to spend time or money how can you expect others to?

I wonder how far this is taken you. You´re arguments suits probably everything…
I´m not unwilling to spend time. I have spend what seems forever to get where I am. With your suggestion, there really any need for anyone to do anything, except pay for it all.
All I suggested was some templates to get the users started… I guess it requires payment. So be it!

There are already templates, loads of them infact inside HabPanel. There is also a Widget gallery with even more and theres many posts on sample widgets. All require some tweaking. I’m not sure what else you’d need?

I have absolutely ZERO angular js experience but was able to tweak almost all to my liking, some completely failed but that’s life.

Patricks CSS themes work well and can be customised fairly easily to suit your various mobile devices. Even the colours are easy to change

I would prefer this thread stays on topic as I would love to hear if people would use the feature I describe to make the time investment worth while or if someone has a better idea. Both a newer version of the sitemap and habpanel is the way to go so people can choose which way they prefer. Some people want fast and others want an exact look and don’t care the time spent to achieve it. Two different tools to choose from which is great. This thread is about improving one of the tools and not about if another way looks better…

Home assistant has a half way interface that is somewhere in between habpanel and our current v2 sitemap,

An example is this…

And a place to go looking if you want a similar look in Openhab 2.x

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Dear all

Without going too deep into this as it would be OT for this thread. For those saying Habpanel is the best, yes for you maybe, not for me. The example shown by @matt1 looks good, but is not what I would like to get in the end. You can ask 30 openHAB professional users and you would get 30 different opinions what the UI for using purpose should look alike. The “user based templating” function is not there in openHAB yet, not in the way as I would expect it.
And this is definitely something that I would wish in a future release of OH.

For sure one can build its own UI based on REST but this is time consuming, frustrating and some times way too much. I started this approach, but my UI is still not finished and not working in the way as I would have it. So for the time being I use the basic UI. Habpanel is not even installed on my OH server

Cheers
Stefan

i agree auto site map will be great …
as much as i want the Cool Matrix theme etc
i dont have time to learn this, and it will look like sh***

even basic UI is getting me tired
i did like the paperUI , approach but it is sad that i cannot configure it

I may be a bit jaded but I spend more time dealing with helping new users work around stuff that OH 2 does automatically, namely the Control tab in PaperUI and Simple Mode, that it will take a lot to convince me that this is a good idea. Honestly, this proposal just sounds like a continuation of this.

But what if it’s something like the Astro binding where I may only care about one or two of the 30+ available Channels? The same goes for OpenWeatherMap. As I look through my Things, I’ve only linked about 50-75% of them to Items. Looking at my Items, only about 75% of those are on my sitemap. Automatically generated UIs like this will result in more work for me or make it so I have to have a bunch of stuff on my UI that I don’t want to be there.

I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. But it very well could become one if it isn’t executed well.

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This is why I am suggesting it offers multiple choices that you can choose from how you want to “Display as” in your sitemap. For example if you have a full colour light with strobe and disco mode controls you can select to ‘Display as’ a ‘Dim/On/Off’ and you only get the two controls. If you want to Display it as ‘Basic with Advanced button’ you then get the basic controls and have a button that opens up the advanced setting when you want them. I have not used the Astro binding to suggest a few ways it could be displayed, but I am sure you could think of 2-3 ways that would keep a lot of people happy and be edited quickly into something that even more would love. Faster to delete a few controls then to create 4 controls from scratch especially when it is a new binding you have never used before.

I also do not like the idea of getting 30+ channels and controls getting thrown into a sitemap, so this is why I am suggesting the “Display as concept” which is done by a Binding creator who understands the hardware and how a lot of people will be using the hardware.

Yes the same could be said about any new feature. This is why a discussion at a concept level is great as someone may have a better idea and I would love to hear how Openhab can be made much faster to setup and remove the chance of a typo causing an issue.

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I would love to see a much more improved designer in the future. I’m playing around with HomeHabbit for a while now and I’m really suprised how easy and well this is working. Sure it has some “issues” and potential for improvements but I was able to get a usable Layout in less than 30mintes by using just my phone (Yes it’s quite warm!)

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