Hi all,
I’ve been familiarizing myself with OH3 and so far I’ve found it to be a major step forward that’s beautiful, sleek and very polished. However, there’s one thing I was disappointed by, and it’s the limited ability to query the API from within the UI to garner extra information about an item.
With the introduction of the semantic model and the emphasis on a clear hierarchy and tagging, I was hoping you could create smart widgets that would “just work” given minimal information, for instance giving a smart thermostat Equipment to a custom widget and having it autodetect the various items from the semantic tags.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the custom widgets only really have access to an item’s state and display state. The semantic tags aren’t exposed, nor are the item’s type or relationships. Even the label seems to be missing. All the examples I’ve been able to find use simple string manipulation with assumptions like “a thermostat’s setpoint is always <itemname>_SetPoint”. While that works, I find it defeats the whole point of having a semantic structure.
What’s the rationale for exposing so little of the REST API in the new UI? Is this something that could be changed in the future? It’s the last thing that’s missing (IMO) from the OH3 UI to make it the end-all be-all.
Thanks!