Empty group gone after plug-in restart

[Charles_cz]

Is that normal behavior that empty groups are automatically deleted after plug-in restart?

I was setting up server and getting groups ready for future use. I have created a lot of groups and to my surprise they were all gone after reboot.
I tested creating a group without any device in it and they are gone after disable - enable plug-in. If I create group and put any device in it it is saved even after plug-in restart.

Am I missing some setting or is it standard behavior? I am using 3.0.0.54

Thank you. Charles

[spud]

It is the expected behavior. An empty group is considered invalid.

[Charles_cz]

I see. It might not be bad idea to make it optional. I am working on setup without devices at this point. This setup will have a lot of device groups. There is a lot of work prep work I can do in your plugin before I start installing devices. I'm placing virtual device in groups for now. I guess it is mentioned somewhere but it was a big surprise to me that all my work (empty device groups) was gone.

One more question spud if you don't mind. Is there any way to change name of existing group without deleting existing one and creating new one and adding devices again? Even if I have to edit file or is not available for reason?

Thank you for great plugin. I can't imagine setting up Homeseer without it now. :-)

Charles

[randy]

I see. It might not be bad idea to make it optional. I am working on setup without devices at this point. This setup will have a lot of device groups. There is a lot of work prep work I can do in your plugin before I start installing devices. I'm placing virtual device in groups for now. I guess it is mentioned somewhere but it was a big surprise to me that all my work (empty device groups) was gone.

One more question spud if you don't mind. Is there any way to change name of existing group without deleting existing one and creating new one and adding devices again? Even if I have to edit file or is not available for reason?

Thank you for great plugin. I can imagine setting up Homeseer without it now. :-)

Charles

The group names are used in Events, you cannot change a Group name (or Schedule name) without editing all the Events that refer to it. If you need to rename a Group and want to go back and edit the Events, you can edit the config file EasyTrigger.ini to change the group name. I have used Jon00's Event Viewer & Documenter script to search all Events using a Group name, then changed it and manually edited all the Events. It is a bit tedious, but it works. There is a [SCHEDULES] section and a [DEVICE_GROUPS] section in the config file.

For adding your group placeholders, you could take a copy of the config file and manually add the names of groups, but it would still be deleted if restarted before you populate the groups. What I did when I was designing Schedules, was to build them all in Notepad, then paste them into the config file while HomeSeer was shut down. I built out a bunch of schedules working on them in Notepad so I could easily see conflicts and overlaps. Once they were done pasting them into the config file made them all available for Events.

Groups are just [Group name]= followed by all the device ReferenceIDs separated by commas.

AllDoors=4565,4542,4558,4566,4532,4531,4552,4523,4522,4528,4 527

The one thing I have successfully done is to sort the groups and scheduled in the config file so they are alphabetical order. I just copy a section into Word or Excel and sort on the names, then paste it back into the config file as plain text.

Before:



After:

[Charles_cz]

rprade, thanks for tips. I will look into that. :-)