Hi! I am a heavy XMPP user and I rely on it a lot for machine interactions as well as person-to-person chats.
Background
The scenario I have in mind is as follows:
: Done and working;
: not working
- A JID exists for the OpenHAB XMPP Binding, e.g.,
openhab@example.com. - One or more authorised JIDs are allowed to send messages to it and a rule in OpenHAB processes the commands.
- When an ‘interesting’ event occurs, OpenHAB reports this to the authorised JIDs.
- For more routine messages (e.g., hourly status report), OpenHAB sends a message to a chatroom (of which it is a member and which has been properly secured, the case being).
The idea is that the user sets his client to notify him of messages received directly from openhab@example.com but notifications are disabled for the chatroom (lets call it home@conference.example.com).
The snag
In order for the last point to work, the message should be of type groupchat. However, currently there is no way to set the message type in the XMPP binding.
I am neither a Java developer nor familiar with Smack but as I understand, it would require that a Message object with Type=groupchat be passed to sendMessage, which is slightly more cumbersome than just passing the String object.
Nevertheless, personally I think giving this binding the capability to send groupchat messages would greatly enhance its already significant usefulness at relatively little cost.
Why?
The user may only have slow and/or sporadic connectivity and XMPP offers a great way of communicating with OpenHAB asynchronously, with both commands and status reports being stored and forwarded as and when connectivity allows.
(Pinging @Pavel_Gololobov as I believe you are the author of this add-on?)