Linking items to things not discovered?

Hello, I will try to explain my issue with OH3 (openhabian installation 1.6.2, Raspberry 3) with some items of my Homematic components. I have used openhabian with OH 2.5.4 before, all worked fine concerning the items I will mention below.
I have set up the installation with all bindings and discovered the CCU2 in the GUI. So far so good. The first thing I recognized is that it only discovered my temperature regulation programs (created in the CCU), not the individual devices (thermostats, window contacts, etc.) anymore as in 2.5.
Next I imported the items. I used the “developer tools” option for it to import the >400 items from my previously backed up item file.
All items appeared properly in the GUI with most of them having NULL as value. Now I tried to understand the concept of linking and I am really a beginner concerning this topic so maybe here is the part that I messed up (maybe I was reading the wrong part of the documentation). I looked up in “Items” for items that have a NULL value. Then I went to “Things” to open the according thing and opened the tab “Channels” to add the link to the item. That worked well and the items in “Item” section showed the new value instead of NULL. Not sure if this procedure was necessary as the *.items file contains the information about the channel but now it is done.

I have much more items than Things which brings me to the actual issue. I have some window/shutter contacts that have been discovered as part of the temperature regulation. However only some items of the contact are listed (e.g. state), not items like the battery state. The battery state is available in “Items” but I don’t have the according thing identified in the GUI. How can I make those things work? How to create Things for those Items to link them?

As mentioned I am starting to learning this new concept (I have always been using textual definition of items because it was the only solution for me that was working - I had lots of issues with backups/recoveries not working, but that is another topic) so maybe you can point me to the right part of the documentation if it is not binding-related (Homematic binding 3.0.0).

If your Thing IDs are the same you wouldn’t need to do that. But based on your description I bet the Things have a different ID when you recreated/rediscovered them.

It should work exactly the same as it did in OH 2.5. If the Thing isn’t showing all the Channels there is either something you didn’t do or did wrong in setting up the bidding, it the binding is not working.

There is nothing you can do from the Item side of things. If there is no Channel, there is nothing to link to the item.

I had the Things discovered by the GUI then I imported the Items. For my Hue devices the channel linkage was set properly, for the Homematic devices nothing is set correctly. Any chance I could have avoided this? I still have to link a lot of imported Items (that would have taken me forever to create them in the GUI) so I would be glad if it was just a simple mistake by me :slight_smile:

Thanks. I scanned again and nothing else was detected with the binding than the Things that had alreay been discovered, Well I guess I have to wait and see if other Homematic users are facing the same issue. It used to work in 2.5 in Paper UI.

For discovered Things probably not. You don’t have the chance to change the ID of a Thing before you accept it. There is an issue opened to support that but I don’t know it’s status.

Have you actually tried? In particular the “add equipment from thing” and" add points from thing" options from the model can have you creating Items very quickly. I abandoned importing my old .items files and create my Items that way now.

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Thanks! I tried that option (“Model” --> “Create Points from Things”) but it only lists the discovered things (which is obvious I believe). Apart from that this functionality does not work on my side. Whatever channel I link from any existing item, it just jumps back to the previous screen. My choice is not considered nor saved.
I guess I will have to wait for updates of openhab 3. I still don’t know what to do with all my items, especially the ones I have created without channels, e.g. the items for habpanelviewer (battery, usage, etc.) or rules like the washingmachine state or the door sensor changes (both examples posted here in the forum) or the items that are not covered with things not scanned by the bindings.

According to my opinion, you simply just got a new bridge id. Unlike the devices, the bridge gets a new guid as id on every discovery. The devices use stable ids from the serail number.

So, you just have to do a quick search and replace in your item files to exchange the old bridge id with the new one.

The homematic channel definition looks like that:

{ channel = "homematic:<device-type>:<bridge-id>:<device-serial-no>:<channel>#<variable>" }

I have just looked it up. The number in the UID of the bridge (I guess you mean the ID that I can see when I open the item in the GUI like “UID: homematic:bridge:NEQxxxxxxx”) is just the same as in the items file imported for the Things discovered in the new GUI as well as the Things not discovered in the GUI.

Strange thing is that some “Things” are discovered like the bridge and the regulation programs but the individual Homematic devices are not identified as “Things”.

After a Firmware update and a reboot (maybe it was just the reboot) of the Homematic Bridge (CCU2) the problem was resolved. All remaining “Things” appeared as such in the corresponding list. Strangely this was not an issue in 2.5.4. Hopefully it will help anyone with the same problem after the switch to 3.0

Thanks for your support Rich and Joachim!