Ideas and Discussion: What Features Do You Want in openHAB 5.0?

[Johnno (John)]

A few posts up, in regards to comparisons to home assistant: there are definitely some back end features that OpenHAB could really benefit from.

I run an instance of HA as well to keep up to date with it and experiment with it’s event and data structure, and how it goes about scripting.

I’ve been reworking some of my JS scripts which implement functionality along the lines of this post:

Design Pattern: Manual Trigger Detection

Edit: Updates for OH 4 Please see Design Pattern: What is a Design Pattern and How Do I Use Them for details on what a DP is and how to use it. Problem Statement Sometimes you are in a situation where you want to know where a certain command came from but there is no way built into the binding or the device to tell the difference between a manually initiated command at the device or a command initiated by a rule or the sitemap. For example, when one wants to override a Rule’s behavior when a l…

One nifty feature in HA is the ability to pass in an arbitrary dictionary of keys into various services (forgive me if I forget the correct terminology for everything…) from memory it’s ‘attributes’: {}

OH has a similar feature in the form of “context” being passed into scripts, but the idea could be expanded to the trigger and event system. For example it would be very helpful to be able to pass in an object with an arbitrary list of keys along when sending a command.

Then if a rule is triggered by ItemCommandTrigger, those keys could then be accessed in a similar way to scripts using ctx[‘key’]