Thermostat Renaming Problem

[jvm]

shill I recently renamed my Honeywell Thermostat using the Honeywell Total Comfort Connect Web Site which caused a few issues with the plugin. Maybe some of these can be addressed so others don't have similar issues. They'are more of a nuisance issue than a major defect, but I'm hoping it may be easy for you to add a fix so others can avoid the problem. Here's the issue . . . .

1. On the Honeywell Total Comfort Connect site, I changed the name of a thermostat. No issue there and the correct Thermostat name then appeared in the Honeywell App and on my iPhone.
2. However, in your plugin, the name did not update on the [Plug-Ins] -> [Honeywell W-Fi Thermostat] -> [Config] page.
3. I tried re-starting the Plugin, but still no update to the name.
4. So, at least on Re-Start, the Plugin should check for a name change (Since the Honeywell Device ID remains the same, I assume you could easily re-query for all the device names and just correlate any "new" name to the existing Honeywell Device ID.

As an FYI - the "real" issue that this created for me was that, in order to try and get the name to update, I deleted the device from the Config page and re-added it. The name did update then, but the Plugin created a whole new group of HomeSeer devices and I had to update all of my events. I had not considered that this would happen. I assume others will occasionally make the same mistake so if you could address it in the plugin to avoid the issue in the first place, that would be helpful.

Thanks.
JVM

[shill]

Great point. Until a recent release, you had to define the name yourself. When I switched to pulling the list of thermostats automatically, I didn't consider the name change. However, I will have to think about how to handle that - if the name changes, it could break scripts referencing the devices by name, just like recreating devices broke your HS events (which reference by device ref).

[jvm]

Great point. Until a recent release, you had to define the name yourself. When I switched to pulling the list of thermostats automatically, I didn't consider the name change. However, I will have to think about how to handle that - if the name changes, it could break scripts referencing the devices by name, just like recreating devices broke your HS events (which reference by device ref).

Maybe scripts could reference by the Honeywell Device ID instead of the name which I assume will remain stable even if the name changes?

Or else, on the [Config] page, you could give a message that the name has changed on the TCC site and have a button / selection whereby you ask the user if they want to change the local name to match the TCC name. Perhaps also give a warning that doing so would break any scripts that reference the thermostat by the 'old' TCC name. That would at least give the user a way to update the name without doing as I did -- i.e., deleting and re-creating the devices.

[shill]

The latter is more what I was thinking. HS script findings have options for by name, by ref, and by address, though very few people use the latter. And since we're talking about user scripts, I can't control how they chose to do it.

[shill]

So I started looking into this and realized there's a much simpler solution: just rename the HomeSeer device. My plugin doesn't care what you call it - in fact, I've customized my HomeSeer device names for all my thermostats. To help, I've added a column to the config page that tells you what Honeywell says the name is vs. what HomeSeer name you're using.

[jvm]

So I started looking into this and realized there's a much simpler solution: just rename the HomeSeer device. My plugin doesn't care what you call it - in fact, I've customized my HomeSeer device names for all my thermostats. To help, I've added a column to the config page that tells you what Honeywell says the name is vs. what HomeSeer name you're using.

I think what you're describing is useful, but I don't know if it gets at the issue I mentioned. My issue was that if I renamed the Thermostat from Honeywell portal, the new name never propagates to the plugin. So as I understand your addition, you would still see the "old" name which came from Honeywell when you first set up the plugin, and in the column next to it, you would see your HomeSeer device's name (which I do see as useful info.), but you would not see the newly populated renamed thermostat name from the Honeywell portal.

In any case, I've already resolved the issue and don't expect to change the names again, so this is just something to consider to help others avoid the problem I had.
Thanks,
Jim

[shill]

My point is that if you want the name of your device in HomeSeer to be different than what it currently is in HomeSeer, you can just rename it... my plugin couldn't care less what the HomeSeer device name is.

The addition of that column is to help keep things straight if they are different for some reason (in my case, the name is in all caps, but I didn't like that, so I renamed it in HomeSeer).