I never saw the point of .things files in the first place. You can’t do automatic discovery with them. There are limitations for some bindings where you can’t even do some important things when using .things files. Having a static text file you have to write and research to get the syntax correct compared to a text file that gets automatically populated with the right information that can’t ever have a syntax error just never seemed like a fair trade. But everyone has differing opinions and OHI supports them all.
But in general, and entity (Item, Thing, Sitemap, Rule) can only be defined in one place. If it’s defined through the UI it can’t be in a .items/.things/.rules/.sitemap file.
To me, it seems inconsistent for someone to want all the specific control over everything to the point that they won’t even allow OH to do some of the things automatically which it was designed and it excels at doing automatically (e.g. Things) to also want to do all the work with the semantic model so OH can automatically build the Overview tabs. If you won’t let it discover and create your Things, why would you let it discover and create your users’ interface which is far more something that we all will want to highly customize.
So that leads me to push users to choose either:
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use OH 3 just as you always have in OH 2.5; everything you’ve always have done is still supported and you can have all the control over everything you need
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Move to using MainUI to manage all your Things and Items (and even your Rules though that’s not a strong recommendation at this time until we get some more docs written) to take advantage of all that’s new in MainUI with the semantic model and Pages.
Trying to stick with text based configs and take advantage of MainUI at the same time is simply too much work and leads you to having a split configuration anyway because there are lots of things that cannot be done in text files in MainUI anyway (e.g. custom widgets).
If you were to move to MainUI for configs, be sure to review OH 3 Tips and Tricks which has lots of advice for how to migrate from text configs, even if you have 100 custom Generic MQTT Things and don’t want to have to click enter each one individually (hint, you don’t have to).