Kwikset Lock family (Black and Decker) Channel Naming Convention

I have a 6 Kwikset Z-wave locks of 2 different models and have set up rules in a manner suggested by several forum members, it’s all working well. During this setup I discovered that the naming convention of the channels of a few of the models is different than the other and I’d like to update the database to make it consistent but looking for feedback from the community first.

The DB has 11 models and 9 with an “Alarm” channel. The issue is that most of them are named like:

Alarm (raw)

but 2 of them are named

Alarm Raw

You will notice the use of paratheses and lower case in the first example and uppercase in the 2nd. This broke my rule because I was assuming the wrong case in the rule. In total there are 20 channels that use the first convention and 2 that use the 2nd. My proposal is to change the DB to use the first convention on those two channels that use the 2nd convention so some future user won’t have this same issue. The things I’m suggesting a change for are:

I also took a quick look at the Yale locks and at first glance they also appear to use the first convention. Any feedback on this proposed change?

I generally agree with naming conventions, but would be concerned about breaking other people’s systems by changing existing entries to suit your needs. I don’t know whether or not that would happen, but it seems reasonable to assume.

What are you doing in a rule that relies on this information?

If your rule is working on items (as I assume?) then you can name your items whatever you like - you don’t need to stick with the names that people use in the database.

If you are doing something to actually get the channels (e doing some sort of REST call), then the best approach is to use the channel type and not the name since this will always be alarm_raw.

This change doesn’t suit my needs because I actually assumed the uppercase version, but I believe the lowercase version is the standard that should be adopted. I’m suggesting this to benefit future users not myself.

My issue is with the naming of Items. This occurs only once for a thing and the application allows for naming the item anything you want; it just follows the channel name by default. It’s that default name which I believe is not ideal. I’ve worked around this by just naming the item the way I wanted. My suggestion is to allow the default name to be consistent so that future users get a consistent experience.

Yes, agree on both points here Chris. I have no functional issue with this configuration, I’m just looking to improve the consistency for future users.

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And for sure that would be good, but there’s no systematic way to change this. I don’t mind if you want to change the definition in the database but there’s no easy way to do it automatically as all the channels are defined per device. It won’t/shouldn’t upset too many things as I would guess most people set their own item description and the channel name itself won’t change.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you weren’t thinking of future users. I was just saying that we may need to think about existing users.

No worries rpwong, thank you so much for the feedback and discussion. Chris mentioned above that existing channel names won’t change if the database is updated and I verified that prior to reading his message. I guess the only users impacted are people who buy a new device of the same type of an existing device they own and if they assume that the label of the channel name is going to be the same on newly discovered devices of that type. I’d assume these people are rare but in this case I am one of them :wink:

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Thanks for the feedback and advise here Chris. I guess one way to go is to pull the full source repository of xml files then set up a scanning tool that looks at channel typeId’s and compares the associated label with some standard that the community agrees on. This is probably a lot of squeeze for not very much juice so I’m going to pass for now. Thanks again for the help.