Simple Form to Update Item State through Sitemap (needs Webserver with php)

[MatzeG (Matthias Grobe)]

Hi all,

maybe there is already a solution in place but I did not find it through googling or in the forum.
And maybe someone is looking for a quite similar solution to be able to update the state of items manually, why I want to share the below. I’m happy for any comments or further ideas/ thoughts to improve.

Reason behind I did this: I use Items for monitoring purposes (like my Gas or Electricity Meters) and afterwards to visualize in Grafana. Sometimes I need to adjust the value manually due to several reasons (ESP or OpenHAB offline (during updates/ configuration puporses etc.).

What I did to reach my goal:

1. set up a WebServer like Apache including php (e.g. on a different machine or if you’re experienced to install on your OpenHAB-machine and use a different port). Maybe the php support for CometVisu is doing the trick as well? I did not test because I’m already running Apache with php on a different machine.

2. amend the attached php-file to your installation and upload to your webserver:
   adjustitem.php.txt (4.0 KB) (remove the “.txt”-Extension before uploading on your webserver).

a) change the Openhab-URL ($ohurl) to your installation
b) change “ITEM1” to the Item-Name respective -Label (in ITEM1-Label). You can reduce or extent as you wish as shown below.

$ohurl = "http://<OPENHAB-IP:PORT>/rest/items/";

function ItemList()
{
?>
<select name="item" id="item">
        <option class="text" value="">---</option>
        <option class="text" value="<ITEM1>"><ITEM1-Label></option>
        <option class="text" value="<ITEM2>"><ITEM2-Label></option>
        <option class="text" value="<ITEM3>"><ITEM3-Label></option>
        <option class="text" value="<ITEM4>"><ITEM4-Label></option>
        <option class="text" value="<ITEM5>"><ITEM5-Label></option>
</select>

3. Create/ amend your Sitemap to include the webview as shown below; change IP and Path to meet your configuration.

Webview icon=none url="http://<WEBSERVER-IP>/<PATH>/adjustitem.php" height=3

I created the php-page very minimalistic in purpose not to need too much space.
I know this is only a small one and maybe there are better aproaches (and definitely this one can be extended massively if needed), but I always tried to find a small and easy solution for this need. Now as I took the time (and not being much experienced neither in php or curl), I’m quite happy with the result.

Maybe it’ll help someone of you guys.

Cheers,
Matze.

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@MatzeG

maybe there is already a solution in place but I did not find it through googling or in the forum.
And maybe someone is looking for a quite similar solution to be able to update the state of items manually,

This is possible out of the box in OH 3 by setting the default card widget. See OH 3 Examples: How to boot strap the state of an Item

@MatzeG

set up a WebServer like Apache including php

I don’t think this is necessary. I think you can use a plain old html file with some simple JavaScript and a form to achieve the same result and then eliminate the dependency on an external server. See OAuth2 using just OH Rules and myopenhab.org for a partial example.

[MatzeG (Matthias Grobe)]

Hi Rich,

cool, good to know as I’m starting migrating my stuff to OH3 soon.

JavaScript is a good idea as well but I’m absolutely inexperienced with JavaScript but a least a little bit in php why I decided to take this way. But definitely there’s different ways to reach that goal.

Many thanks for your comments and best,
Matthias.