[SOLVED] Tutorial questions - can't create items via .items files

When following the tutorial, creating new items via files is seemingly not possible. I am able to create and edit .items files, but their contents are ignored and unavailable for use inside sitemaps.

I suspect this might be because the tutorial has you enable Simple Mode for Item Bindings, which seemingly generates items for you (and prevents editing them). However, even disabling that mode and attempting to edit the generated items (via the UI) does not work - none of the UI fields are editable.

This seems to mean that 1) the tutorial presents an impossible path to follow, and 2) using Simple Mode for Item Binding means you are forever stuck with horribly-named and unintuitive names for items inside sitemaps.

For example, this will work inside a sitemap:
Switch item=tplinksmarthome_hs105_5F57AB_switch label="Bedroom Lamp"

but I cannot create a friendly-named item as the tutorial implies - this does NOT work in a .items file
Switch Plug_Bedroom_Lamp "Bedroom Lamp" <switch> { channel="tplinksmarthome:hs105:5F57AB:switch" }

I assume I can just delete all the generated items, disable Simple Mode, and go and manually add everything back in the style of the tutorial, but I wanted to check if this was intended, or if there is something I am missing regarding configuration.

  • Platform information:
    • Hardware: Pi Zero W
    • OS: Raspbian, latest
    • Java Runtime Environment: Zulu Embedded 1.8.0_152
    • openHAB version: 2.3.0 Release Build
1 Like

Yes

Yes

Wow!! You should upgrade, you will soon hit performance issues a soon as you start adding bindings and persistence…

Great, thank you for the confirmation. I was just a bit confused since it seemed like the new user tutorial wasn’t doing what I expected.

Haha, I am planning to upgrade soon, but I already had the 0W on hand from an improvised bridge control project so I figured I would try things out with it first. I’m sort of surprised it runs reasonably well, seeing how resource-hungry java is…