Dear Vera Control, Ltd,
I’m a user of the Vera since several years, and I develop regularly scripts and plugins.
There are some limitations that are annoying.
So, here is my wish list :
1/ Managing http POST request in handlers.
Handler is a great feature to exchange structured information, as a webservice.
But the problem is that it does not support POST request… worst this kind of request is making the Vera crash.
So for exchanging lots of information, there’s just the upload of file, which is not very convenient.
2/ Make functions luup.xxx able to manage functions and not just name of functions.
The luup functions (e.g. luup.call_delay, luup.variable_watch, …), that take a callback as parameter, just accept string (name of the function).
It implies that this name has to be in the global namespace.
When you have a lot of methods that you want to regroup in a namespace, it raises a problem.
One solution is to make a fake namespace in global namespace :
_G["RulesEngine.Event.onDeviceVariableIsUpdated"] = Event.onDeviceVariableIsUpdated
This is not really elegant.
3/ Be able to stop a watch or a timer.
When you set a watch with luup.variable_watch, or set a timer, you can’t cancel it.
The only way is to restart the luup engine. It’s surely the reason of these so many luup reloading when adding or updating a device or a scene.
4/ Change unicity rule and add an alias for a device.
To identify a device, you have its id, name (description) and room.
As user, it’s simplier to use a common name in the UI (e.g. “main light”) and use it with the room (e.g. in voice recognition “main light in the living room”). As the description must be unique in the system, it can raise a problem with some devices (e.g. “main light” in a guest room and “main light” in living room).
4.1/ an unicicity rule using the description AND the room could resolve this issue.
4.2/ remove the limit of 20 characters in description
When you want to handle devices outside of the Vera, in an event collector by example, it’s more simplier to use a synthetic description and/or the id (e.g. “LivingRoom_MainLight” instead of an id that could change with an upgrade of the Vera or of the device).
This description is not compatible with the “human-readable” description in the UI.
4.3/ Adding a new field “alias” could resolve this issue.