openHAB 3.4 Release discussion

Going on a tangent here, but what I would like to have is a simpler way of using the state description pattern to display units. I’m not a programmer, I don’t know what to type to properly show units correctly. For the longest time this blew my mind because I wrote “Watt” or “%” and it didn’t display properly. I can’t guess the best way, but I’d love to have a sort of a click box where I could simply pick the unit from a list and openHAB would add the correct string needed to show the units for display purposes.

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C’mon, it is all in the docs.

Going back to openHAB 2.x, we already had the option to define state descriptions :

"Outside [%.2f °F]"

In general, the syntax did not change, it was just extended.

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Yes! Of course, now I know that. But it wasn’t my first thought to check when I started out.
What I’m saying is that it could be a bit better/easier/cleaner to do this in the UI, instead of having to guess what to do or where to go.

Edit:
Also, all of the examples in the docs are for configuration files - I didn’t know how to use those examples with the mainUI and metadata. :confused:

Maybe a link in the state description saying “if you’re not sure what to put here check this page “ - this alone would have saved me a fair amount of troubleshooting time.

But if we could have a tick box (or similar , something visual to help guide users in choosing it) to select the unit we wouldn’t need to look at the docs. Just select “watts”, another one to pick watts or Kwatts or something.
(yes I’m over simplifying, this isn’t as easy as that, just an example!)

Edit 2: humm in hindsight this isn’t a good place for this post - should I copy this to the 4.0 wishlist post instead???

If you’re using the web GUI, I think this is a very reasonable request/idea.

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yes

In OH 3.4 and before, yes. The state description pattern does more than just dictate how it’s displayed. Indeed, that’s the unit that persistence assumes when persisting and restoring.

In OH 4 there is ongoing work to separate state description so it only impacts how it’s displayed and an alternative mechanism to control the actual unit series by the item, persistence, etc.

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Thank you, Rich!
Looking forward to OH 4

Would a link to OpenHAB docs State Description already make a difference?

Does anyone know if there is a known bug in the UI?

What kind of bug ? You need to be more precise asking such a question.

Some feedback from my update from 3.4.0 to 3.4.1 from yesterday.
Here it seems that OH and the Addons got an update.
It was needed from me, to do an manual reboot otherwise some Items were not displayed.
Also I saw, that Values and Items from my Shelly TRV Thermostat were not working.
The only way was, to delete the Shelly TRV as a thing an create them new.
Now the values are back and it seems that it works.
What else I need to look on it?

Is there a changelog from the Shelly ADDON from 3.4.0 to 3.4.1 ?

BR
Jochen

No change about Shelly binding in 3.4.1.

I have trouble with the Sonos binding, as i wrote in the two threads:
Sonos not recognized after upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3
SONOS Binding does not work after update to 3.4.1. anymore

I updated to 3.4.1 and now I’m having trouble editing my sitemap because apparently there are syntax errors which haven’t been there for earlier version of OH (I did not change the sitemap):

I read in this forum that the new line character message probably means that something is wrong in the group section, but I cannot figure out what it is since it was working perfectly before.

Not an expert on this at all, but it looks to me the message is saying there is a space after the “}”. Is there?

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Replace Group by Text and it should work. The checker is a bit more strict in the 3.4.1 version. It expects an item for the Group.

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That was it! Thank you!
The checker complained about a couple of other things (mainly charts) after I replaced all the Groups with Text but now it looks fine. :+1:

I upgraded to 3.4.1 (from 3.3) and no manual jar in the /usr/share/openhab/addon folder is loaded anymore. I’ve tried different files/jar’s, checked file permissions, restarted multiple times but no go.

Nothing in the logs indicate trying to load them even, it’s like a setting that disables manual files has been activated somehow without me knowing about it …what am I missing? :woozy_face:

In my experience, it helps to delete the files from the addons folder, wait a couple of minutes, and then add the files to the folder again. (Keep copies elsewhere before deleting…)

enable debug logging for org.apache.karaf and org.openhab then move the jar(s)

Clean the cache.