Several questions about writing bindings

Development
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Hello dear maintainers! I am working now on another binding for yet another piece of equipment, supported by me and not supported by OH (yet). I’ve got several unconnected questions:

  1. The Thing in question outputs some datestamps . Is there any better way to represent a DateTime channel , rather than formatting it as a string ? If yes, how to specify it in the binding XML, how to configure the respective item ? What formatting specifiers are there to use ? If i want to get e. g. full “DD-MM-YYYY hh:mm” date/time. And the most important - what the underlying Number representation should be ?
  2. Is there any way for the Binding to know that a Channel is linked or unlinked to/from an item? In other words, starts or stops being used? The Thing in question talks over a serial port at rather slow speeds (9600 bps max), and almost each Channel needs to be polled separately by sending a specific query packet. It would be a waste of bus traffic to poll for unused channels. I know that when a channel starts being used, the Binding gets RefreshType command on the channel; this is how i detect that the channel is in use. But is there any notification on channel removal ?
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There is a DateTimeType. You can use DateTime in the xml. See Items | openHAB and see other bindings for examples for how to configure or set a pattern in the xml.

You can use the method isLinked to check if a channel is linked to an item. This method is available in your handler class, inherited via BaseThingHandler

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Thank you for replies

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