I’ve been using OH since i dont know when, but its been a while, i cant remember which betaof v1 i jumped in on… Anyway I still feel like my setup is work in progress and i probably spend far too much time tweaking an breaking stuff. I have a great advantage of only having the dog complaining if something doesn’t work.
So where am i getting to… i do find that i spend a lot of time changing things… e.g. that group setup doesn’t work, don’t like that naming convention now, wanna use this icon for this item type now… anyway, as you can imagine doing this is the GUI became tedious as it was item/thing by item/thing… so i moved over to files… this was a big enabler for how i make use of OH, but then cos i have OCD i like to break things down, so i still ended up with multiple files to modify and i had to ensure they all linked together properly…
I did go down the road of trying to have a single script (yes shell not perl, none of this new fangled stuff for me) that all the objects i wanted to create/delete and execute the REST api to do the work… Although this worked, it wasnt quick, and timings went astray occasionally (my bad for not checking RC from previous calls i expect)
So what I have ended up with is… a bit of a mess but it works great for my thought processes…
- I create a thing/item script which when passed parameters creates a line item/stanza for a thinge/item
- I have a master setup script (one for things, one for items) which holds and calls the above scripts and know which item/thing file to put the entries into…
so to add a new item i would just put an entry like the below in my setup file.
./heimansocket.sh OPIMQTT TumbleDryer TumbleZZDryer Garage gZigBee
The effort this took as been well and truly paid back to me, and i can now… on a whim
- remove all my item files knowing i can recreate them with a single command.
- add a single item/thing by updating a file
- Dont like the name for that group of devices, change it in one file…
Its certainly not perfect, but as i said i do like to tweak and modify constantly…
Anyway for me, the answer is, if things are relatively unchanging, and at some point that will be the case for me, i would go with the GUI, though somethings dont jump out as how to achieve them, but that’s probably just me. BUT if you want to constantly modify go with files…
P.S. I realise im a bit late to the party on this one