openHAB 4.0 wishlist

massi · December 30, 2022, 6:15am

Auto suggestion of bindings to install
(for example in inbox and/or during first startup wizard)

I found this a good idea to simplify beginners setup (the issue is 1y old):

[RfC] Central UPnP/mDNS thing discovery for suggesting add-ons to install

opened 12:24AM - 26 Dec 21 UTC

I'm creating this issue as [I mentioned an idea](https://github.com/openhab/open…hab-addons/pull/11834#issuecomment-1000441090) over in another discussion. I haven't detailed it out in any way, but we could use this issue to discuss whether it makes any sense to pursue it at all. The rough outline is: Many "Things" can be discovered nowadays through mDNS+UPnP. openHAB currently only adds them to the Inbox, if the user has already installed the according add-on(s). Especially for new users, it would be very nice if this wouldn't be possible: openHAB could identify supported devices and suggest the user to install certain add-ons instead (e.g. as a step in the setup wizard that @ghys created with the main UI). There might be different ways to realize this: 1. The bindings currently implement a `DiscoveryParticipant` service. These are usually in a separate package and pretty independent of the other binding code. We could create a single new bundle in openhab-core that contains all these `DiscoveryParticipant`s and which is part of the default installation. The problem with this approach would be that add-on specific code would have to be added to openhab-core as well. This is imho neither from an architectural point of view nor from a contribution process a desired setup. 2. We could come up with some new concept, like additional metadata within the openhab-addons repo, which only contains the discriminators that are required to identify a supported device from a mDNS/UPnP info object. This metadata could be made available as a file (or files in a folder) to the distro and some generic core feature, which evaluates this data and that is capable to provide a list of add-ons to the UI that the user might want to install. While this approach won't be able to directly add Things to the Inbox, it might be a suitable way to also bridge the gap between discovery and still requiring the user to install the add-on before a discovery result can anyhow be accepted. Let me know what you think!