Manual and PaperUI Linking of item to channel

I am installing six GC-TBZ48 thermostats in our club building, and am experiencing some difficulties getting manually linked channels to work properly.

If I use paperUI to link a z-wave temperature channel to an item that it auto creates, then the log file shows the item updates.

In addition, I want another item linked to the same zwave channel. I define an Item in an items file linked to the zwave channel, then PaperUI shows -NaN for my manually linked item, and the one configure with PaperUI stops receiving updates.

With this large installation, I’m finding that PaperUI is getting in the way of group management. I can’t seem to go completely text on this, and am not sure why. I’m using the syntax in the documentation.

Number:Temperature tstat_choir_temperature   "Choir Temperature [%.1f °F]"   <temperature> (gSetpointChoir) ["CurrentTemperature"]    {channel="zwave:device:f2325b65:node5:sensor_temperature"}

Does anyone have an example items and things file for a working thermostat?

everything looks right in your item file example. I use text items files and after placing the file in the items folder, I look in Paper UI and the link to the manually created item is shown on the channel

You need to choose whether to link things manually or through the Paper UI. I decided to do things manually.
If you have a mixture, it gets difficult to remember how each item was set up if you wish to change in the future.

Thanks for the feedback. I made my Items, and then linked them to the channel in the PaperUI. I did discover something. The -NaN reoom temperature that is displayed can be clicked on and modified. So, OH thinks this is a setpoint, and not a read-only field. That’s why it wasn’t getting updated. How do I change this behavior?

PaperUI is an administrative UI. It’s for peeking at stuff and tinkering with it. Never intended for use as the day-to-day UI.
So it has little idea about “read only”. Want to alter a value, to see if your new rule works? Go ahead.

Setpoint in openHAB is a widget used in sitemaps to allow the end user to alter values. There is no idea of setpoint in PaperUI.

Just to clarify, if you create an Item via an xxx.items file you cannot edit it in PaperUI. These are separate methods to manage, and cannot update each other with changes.
But that’s fine, the Items they create are all alike otherwise. You can use both (but remember what you are doing).

You should be able to add a channel you found in PaperUI to an xxx.items file based Item.
I have doubts that the NaN you see in PaperUI has any particular meaning though, bearing in mind PaperUI has poor visibility of file based Items inner workings.
I’d be more interested in what it looked like in a proper UI or via REST interrogation, or even if events.log showed the two Items being updated in parallel.

Replying via email here. In the paper UI, I was on the control panel. It’s convenient for checking to see what items are linked.

I’m sorry but this is incorrect

You can also link items in HabMin, I believe.

I’m not sure what I did different, but it seems to be working now. I deleted all of my items I could find in PaperUI, and unlinked all items from my Thing. I’m not too interested in making a Things file, because that seems to be easy enough to manage in the GUI. The Items, though, were getting tedious to add to groups for the rules I want.

The problem I was seeing is that an Item (in items file, and linked via PaperUI), actual temperature, should be read only. In PaperUI (control tab), it was initialized to undef, and displaying -NaN. For some reason I clicked on it to discover that I could change its value. This leads me to believe that PaperUI set the wrong command class doing the linking. OH1 used to have the zwave="…" configuration where the command class is explicit. With OH2, channel="…", I suppose the command class is defined in the database.

That is the way I configure OpenHAB, using Paper UI to create things then I use text files for items.
It is a common method used by many

The thing about how the value being read only in Paper UI may just be a glitch with the user interface itself.