Location Item and persistence

[sipvoip (Nathan Stratton)]

What persistence works with Location item type? I have tried db4o, mysql, and jdbc.mysql and none of them look like they will store the data. I know I could store as lat/long, but all my phones and vehicles are normalized to Location pointType.

[sipvoip (Nathan Stratton)]

Is it possible there is something wrong with Location type in OpenHab 2? I ask because my mysql persistence works for all item types other then Location. I also now notice that in Classic UI Location types show 0 when they used to show a map of the location. I know the location is not 0 because I see it in event logs.

2017-07-13 13:01:14.883 [ItemStateChangedEvent     ] - Nathan_Location changed from 39.485763581747,-77.909454731877 to 39.485770321958,-77.909558587089
2017-07-13 13:01:20.035 [ItemStateChangedEvent     ] - Beth_Location changed from 39.553717598356,-77.994618527664 to 39.553649537302,-77.994805192647

[NCO (E. Gerland)]

Hi @sipvoip,

I just recognized the same issue.
Havee you been able to find a solution (I am using mysql persistence).
Thanks in advance.

[sipvoip (Nathan Stratton)]

Nope

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

I’m using MariaDB and jdbc-mariadb for persistence, and I ran into the same issue. I eventually just went back to using Strings for our location items. When I saw this post it reminded me of the last thing I wanted to try but haven’t yet… changing the data type in location items tables to GEOMETRY for the Value column. I doubt this will do it and that there is a problem with the binding (it creates location item tables with VARCHAR), but without digging into the code to look, it should be an easy thing to test. If anyone else tries this before I get to it, I’d recommend a fresh backup in case the VARCHAR <–> GEOMETRY conversion does not go well! Or has someone already tried this?

[ThomDietrich]

A Location item consists of two or optionally three float numbers. Did you ever consider simply persisting these parts? You have to remember, that persistence is only halve the job. What are you going to do with that data later? If you want to use it in another application, chances are high you will benefit from Decimal numbers in clearly addressable fields.

Did I miss anything?

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

@ThomDietrich

Did I miss anything?

The specific issue is restoring persistence data to a Location item.

[ThomDietrich]

Ah I see.

Not quite the same but maybe this goes into the right direction: Switch value changing to Null. Why!?

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

@ThomDietrich

Not quite the same but maybe this goes into the right direction

Nah… completely different issue. In my experience, the Location item data is persisted properly, but the restore on startup throws an error. (which I do not have handy).

Edit: found it in an old backup:

2017-07-24 03:09:58.913 [ERROR] [pse.smarthome.core.items.GenericItem] - Tried to set invalid state 41.226653,-81.722503 (StringType) on item Home_Hinckley of type LocationItem, ignoring it
2017-07-24 03:09:58.943 [ERROR] [pse.smarthome.core.items.GenericItem] - Tried to set invalid state 41.2266068,-81.7225042 (StringType) on item Lisa_Location of type LocationItem, ignoring it
2017-07-24 03:09:59.042 [ERROR] [pse.smarthome.core.items.GenericItem] - Tried to set invalid state 41.2267487,-81.7224206 (StringType) on item Scott_Location of type LocationItem, ignoring it

[ThomDietrich]

Depends. My opinion is that restoreOnStartup is hugely overrated and it’s more important to make sure the system reinitialized correctly.

Anyhow! Back to the issue, that is indeed awkward and you should open an Issue on GitHub for that. A LocationItem can be set by a StringType, as far as I remember.

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

@ThomDietrich

you should open an Issue on GitHub for tha

I agree… it appears to be affecting multiple people. I opened this…
https://github.com/openhab/openhab2-addons/issues/2702

[NCO (E. Gerland)]

Like @ThomDietrich suggested, I tried the way of separating the Location coordinates and it was actually much simpler than I expected:
Items:

Location 	Location_Home
Number		Location_Home_Lat		(G_Numbers)
Number		Location_Home_Lon		(G_Numbers) 

Initialization (startup.rules)

// set home location coordinates
	Location_Home_Lat.postUpdate(38.897676)
	Location_Home_Lon.postUpdate(-77.036626)

and calculation in geofencing.rules:

rule "Calc Distance of from Home"
when
	Item mqttLatitude changed or
	Item mqttLongitude changed
then
	val Loc_Home_tmp = new PointType(Location_Home_Lat.state as DecimalType, Location_Home_Lon.state as DecimalType)
	Location_Home.postUpdate(Loc_Home_tmp)
	val dist_Home_tmp = (Location_).distanceFrom(Location_Home)
	mqttDist.postUpdate(dist_Home_tmp.intValue)
end

[viktor_Sc (Viktor Schopf)]

Hi there,

I have the same issue now that I can’t store location items to my mySQL DB.
As Thom suggested I would like to separate the values to different items. Did somebody do that already so I might use the script? I use the iCloud binding for that so I get the values directly to the one item:

Location	VSiPhone_Location				"Viktor Koordinaten"									<apple>		(giCloud, giCloudLocation)	{channel="icloud:device:viktor:VSiPhone:location"}

Thanks,
Viktor

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

@viktor_Sc

Did somebody do that already so I might use the script?

Look up one post…

I’ve recreated the issue in the correct repo…

[Persistence] JDBC and MySQL restoreOnStartup throw error for Location items

[viktor_Sc (Viktor Schopf)]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your reply. I’m not getting it
The issue is open. Fine so far. But what I want is to extract the latitude, altitude and longtitude from the location item in other items so that I have them. Do I miss anything?

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

Apologies… I thought there was more to @NCO’s example! This may not help you, since I don’t split the lat and lon, but just put the location into a String Item (which does persist, and can be converted to a Location in rules), but this is my rule, using openhab2-jython modules and MQTT2 binding w/Owntracks…

import json
from core.rules import rule
from core.triggers import when

@rule("Light: Location changed")
@when("Item Scott_Location_Raw changed")
@when("Item Lisa_Location_Raw changed")
def locationChanged(event):
    if json.loads(str(event.itemState))['_type'] == "location":
        person = event.itemName.replace("_Location_Raw","")
        events.postUpdate("{}_Location".format(person),"{},{}".format(str(json.loads(str(event.itemState))['lat']),str(json.loads(str(event.itemState))['lon'])))
        events.postUpdate("{}_Accuracy".format(person),str(json.loads(str(event.itemState))['acc']))
        events.postUpdate("{}_Battery".format(person),str(json.loads(str(event.itemState))['batt']))
        #locationChanged.log.debug("Location changed: {}: {}".format(person,event.itemState)) 

And here is the same rule using the Rules DSL (requires the JSONPATH transform service)…

rule "Location: Parse location events"
when
    Item Scott_Location_Raw changed
    or
    Item Lisa_Location_Raw changed
then
    if (transform("JSONPATH","$._type",triggeringItem.state.toString) == "location") {
        val String person = triggeringItem.name.replace("_Location_Raw","")
        postUpdate(person + "_Location",(new PointType(transform("JSONPATH", "$.lat", triggeringItem.state.toString) + "," + transform("JSONPATH", "$.lon", triggeringItem.state.toString))).toString)
        postUpdate(person + "_Accuracy",transform("JSONPATH", "$.acc", triggeringItem.state.toString))
        postUpdate(person + "_Battery",transform("JSONPATH", "$.batt", triggeringItem.state.toString))
        //logDebug( "Rules","Presence: Location: {}: triggeringItem.state=[{}]",triggeringItem.name,triggeringItem.state)
    }
end

And some Items…

String      Scott_Location_Raw	            "Location: Raw (Scott) [%s]"		        <error>	    (gPresenceAndMode)	{ channel="mqtt:topic:owntracks:scottLocation" }
String      Scott_Location	                "Location (Scott) [%s]"		                <error>	    (gPresenceAndMode)
Number      Scott_Accuracy	                "Location: Accuracy (Scott) [%s]"		    <error>	    (gPresenceAndMode)
Number      Scott_Battery	                "Location: Battery (Scott) [%s]"		    <error>	    (gPresenceAndMode)

[viktor_Sc (Viktor Schopf)]

Right, thanks.
I now created a new item and simply set it with a rule:

rule "Viktor iCloud Location String Item"
when
	Item VSiPhone_Location changed
then
	VSiPhone_Location_String.postUpdate(VSiPhone_Location.state)
end

It seems to work. Now I have all three values in one text item. I still don’t know if I need them separately. My plan is to create a kind of map where I see all the locations I was at…

[5iver (Scott Rushworth)]

@viktor_Sc

My plan is to create a kind of map where I see all the locations I was at…

Here is a good example/tutorial. I built something similar, but it gives you a trail of your locations for the last 24 hours (configurable), but haven’t made the time to post it.

Owntracks Presence Detection and Location Display on Google Map Tutorial

Long time lurker here who has benefited a huge amount from this forum. I’ve seen lots of posts with questions on this topic and I have learned from some of them. I thought I would provide my solution for a working setup. This setup uses the mqtt binding for grabbing the location data and Owntracks/Mqttitude binding for geofence switches. It utilizes google maps for the display of the locations. I have a “notify on motion” switch setup which when turned on, stores the users location in a var…

[viktor_Sc (Viktor Schopf)]

Nice, thanks a lot!

[tnemrap (Michael Parment)]

Any update on this i try to get rid of all workarounds in my system and want to persist my Location objects.

/mike