tl;dr: please keep configuration files and broaden them to cover all the new UI things. Ideally, have the UI back annotate into the /etc/openhab config files.
I really love the new chart tools that I see in Chart Pages. They look gorgeous and are responsive. I hope, but don’t know, that they are lighter weight than my previous use of influxdb and grafana.
I’m nervous having two systems in place at the same time, though I recognize that is necessary for backward compatibility.
But I just hope that the config files are not on their way out.
The biggest advantage they have over the UI is being able to easily understand them as a user. It means I can package up the user-configurable elements to my installation and then use them again on a completely different system… either by cut and pasting elements that someone else designed or when I upgrade/downgrade my system. It’s so easy to find problems by looking at log files and fixing those files.
Thanks!
Rudy
Please post configurations (if applicable):
Items configuration related to the issue
Sitemap configuration related to the issue
Rules code related to the issue
Services configuration related to the issue
If logs where generated please post these here using code fences:
They are not. However, MainUI stuff will probably largely remain UI only (note UI only doesn’t literally mean through a GUI, anything that can be done through a UI can also be done through the REST API). In particular Custom Widgets. But even there an issue is opened to add an import/export to file option. That won’t automatically load and save to that file but it could be handy for bringing in custom widgets and rules until the market place gets built.
I can’t imagine anyone spending the time and effort to create the brand new syntax to write that stuff out to a new config file though. Yannick I think has made clear that he has no intention of writing out Pages stuff to external configs in /etc/openhab. Everything else (except HAPanel) though is well supported ether through config files in /etc/openhab or through the UI. But you can’t easily move between the two as there is no software that can write out to the config file formats and none of the current maintainers has any interest in volunteering their time to write one. If someone new comes along and implements it I’m sure it would be accepted though.
But a lot of what makes up the automatically generated pages can be controlled through Item metadata. So from that perspective you can define much of your Page’s look and feel through your .items files. But creating new Pages, custom widgets, and stuff like that you are stuck with the UI.
