No demo files, specifically no demo sitemap Openhab2

Setup, Configuration and Use Items & Sitemaps
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1

I’ve been running OpenHAB 1 for about 2 years now and i decided to upgrade to OH2 last night. Despite spending nearly 12 hours on 2 installs of OH2, it just still isn’t working.

I’m running on Ubuntu 16, installed through the apt-get repo method using your install guide, once it was installed, i headed over the :8080 and selected Expert Method (due to me knowing the text based method from OH1), once that had setup and given me a choice of UI, i used the paperUI to install the mqtt binding and then closed the browser and continued with command line installation/config. So I headed into the /etc/openhab2/services and editted the mqtt.cfg file for my broker config (same machine) so i put my broker link in, checked the logs and that was fine. All connected up to my MQTT server. I then decided to add an item to test, so i navigated to /etc/openhab2/items. I did a ‘show all contents’ with “ls” and there was nothing apart from a readme.txt file and therefor i created my own demo.items and added:

Group All
Group gSwitch (All) // Contains all switches
Group gSF (All) // Second Floor
Group SF_CinemaRoom "Cinema Room" <video> (gSF)

Switch CinemaRoom_Light01 "Ceiling Lights" <light> (SF_CinemaRoom) {mqtt=">[mymosquitto:Gateway1-in/4/1/1/0/2:command:ON:1], >[mymosquitto:Gateway1-in/4/1/1/0/2:command:OFF:0]"}

I then went to /etc/openhab2/sitemaps and sure enough, the same situation, no demo files other than a readme.txt. So again, i added my own ‘demo.sitemap’ and then added:

sitemap default label="Main Menu"
{
	Frame label="Cinema Room" {
		Switch item=CinemaRoom_Light01
	}
}

I then went and restarted openhab with systemctl command, while monitoring the openhab.log and events.log i watched the server restart and went to check out my results on the classic UI. Nothing.

Do i have no demo files because i chose to go the expert install route? or is it something to do with me choosing to use the BETA release install?

Would you recommend i do a manual install rather than a apt-get repo style one?

I must say, first impressions of OpenHAB2 is not great for me. I loved using OH1!

If you think this post would be more suited in another location, please specify where, and i will move it :slight_smile:

2

I actually do not understand how i have gotten this to work.

This is a complete guess, but i think that there was nothing wrong. I’m not sure how to get any of the UI’s working apart from HABPanel. Do i need to specify sitemaps for the other UI’s or something? I’m a little confused now… But either way, the HABPanel is working as i would expect openhab to work.

Could someone advise me how to get the others working please? None of them are seeing the sitemaps, PaperUI is seeing the items, just not mapping them to a sitemap (is it even supposed to use a sitemap?)

3

You may want to read up in the docs (http://docs.openhab.org/) to understand what changed. Coming from 1.8, at the very least the concept of things will be new, yet essential to understand. Bindings often changed too quite a bit, and the configuration of bindings is different. OH2 is substantially different from 1.8
There is even a tutorial on migration: http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html
I believe the demo file will only show up if you install the demo version, as you chose expert, they will not be installed.
Unless something went terribly wrong (which does not seem to be the case), and you installed the UI’s you want in PaperUI, they whould all show up if you direct your browser to: http://IP_ADDRESS:8080 (which gets redirect to http://IP_ADDRESS:8080/start/index). My two UI show up there for me to chose.

And finally, no, the PaperUI will not use your sitemap, it is not an end-User interface, but an extremely convenient tool to configure OH2.

4

Thanks for the rely Lipp. I actually used the migration guide and been reading bits of the docs file. However, it seems i need to read it from start to finish as i really did get lost with the changes. I have the start page where i can choose which tool i use to config or view my system, that landing page is working fine. But its when i go inside of them that are not showing certain things. But this may be down to my own knowledge of 2.0 by the sounds of things. I will continue to use the sitemaps, items and rules files as that is what i’m familiar with, do you see those being phased out any time soon?

I’m not even sure i was on 1.8 if i’m honest, it may well have been before that version. Most of my bindings are all using MQTT as i’m using mysensors.org for most of my modules, either the communities designs or my own custom made hardware. I have a few little things to config now, such as persistence using MySQL (What do you use for persistence?) and some mapping files to create too.

5

I don’t know if this helps but maybe you can learn something from this thread. :slight_smile:

6

Thank you. I will take a read shortly. As i installed from a repo with apt-get i don’t get any of the conf folder structure, but there is equivalent, i’m sure. Its all very alien, coming from text based into a more GUI friendly controller. Just the same struggle as it is going from GUI to text.

7

My guess would be that you may need to define some things/channels and map to them items to make it all work.

No risk at all here. Things got added to improve the separation of abstraction layers, I am not aware of any desire to get rid of these.

For restoreOnStartUp I use mapDB (only persist one point in time though, not the whole history), for the rest rrd4j; however, note that contrary to the behavior of rrd4j in 1.8 it persist strictly numerical values only and does not map on off to 0 and 1 anymore. Lot’s of chatter in the forum about Grafana and InfluxDB if you want to make nice charts; but I have no personal experience. There are excellent guides in the forum though, on how to set it up.

8

This is not due to manual vs apt-get instal; OH2 is structured differently and by default there are no conf files for bindings anymore (for OH2 bindings), there are still some configuration on the binding level, but most will be done on a thing level. things, items, rules, sitemaps (as well as maps, etc) can all be still be configured in text files if you prefer that, in fact aside from things and items where you have a choice, they all still rely on textual setup.

9

Even though rrd4j doesn’t retain maps, when it passes that information back to the controller, it will map it using the transforms though, right?

When i said that there wasn’t any conf folder structure due to the apt-get install, i had my information from here. http://docs.openhab.org/installation/linux.html

I know that isn’t within the /etc/ folder, but it is still the site configuration folder location.

10

Sorry, don’t know. All I wanted to point out was that in contrast to 1.8 rrd4j does now only persist strictly numerical values and does not auto-map boolean values anymore (caused me a few hours of frustration when I made the switch)