While I continue to wait for both my SmartThings kit/gear to arrive and access to the IDE, I have questions after reading through the latest round of documentation.
The first question I have is:
Can “containers” be nested?
More specifically, can a “location” be a collection of {sub}-locations? Likewise, can “groups” be nested?
The answer to this will greatly influence how I will have to design my planned application … or if I need to implement the front-end business logic & organisation external to the SmartThings cloud.
He’re is what Jesse, our main architecture genius said, “As of right now, containers cannot be nested as described. A location can have hubs, devices, apps, and groups. A group can have devices (and eventually apps).”
Thank-you for the prompt response … I had suspected as much from the documentation, but thus far have not been able to confirm.
This means, I will need to implement the organisation and (at least part of) the business logic external to SmartThings and then interface with your Cloud {which also does not appear to be available yet?}. I definitely need locations to be compound objects … so I could implement a container above your “location” - or we could collectively introduce the concept of a “Unit” as another container in your model.
I will revisit my draft plans and see if I can find a way to flatten my planned use of groups … though for similar reasons to the need for compound/nested locations, my plans leveraged the idea that groups can contain other groups.