Trrying to turn a device off after a certain amount of time

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

Examples of Expire Binding as a Timer:

Design Pattern: Expire Binding Based Timers

Problem Statement One often needs to schedule some code to execute at some time in the future. The “usual” way to achieve this is by using a Timer which lets you create and schedule a lambda to execute at a given date and time. However, Timers have their drawbacks including: the need to keep track of open Timers so they can be canceled at a later date, often requiring the use of HashMaps or some other data structure rescheduling or creating a cascade of Timers is challenging (i.e. when a tim…

@mstormi

Also, I vaguely recall that if comparing against null, you need to use !== (or ===) in latest software version, but I fail to find a reference. Usually the rule parser will complain about.

I would wait for an error in the logs before I would blindly switch over to using !== and === verses != and == because the two are really two different operations and it is not entirely clear to me yet exactly when the rules parser complains about it.

== calls the .equals method but === does a Java identity equals. Thus if I had:

val string1 = "foo"
val string2 = "foo"

operator	result	comment
string1 == string2	true	compares each letter in the two strings
string1 != string2	false	comares each letter in the two strings
string1 === string2	false	determines if both variables point to the same place in memory
string1 !== string2	true	determines if both variables point to different places in memory

As you can see, in this case, == and === produce exactly opposite results.

The reason why string1 === string2 doesn’t work as expected is because string1 and string2 are not literally the same object and === only compares the memory address the variables point to.

Unfortunately, this is something built into the base language and not something I think we can get rid of in OH 2, but were I king for a day I would find a way to make == smarter and do away with === because it is only going to continue to cause major headaches going forward.