Interacting with Rooms

SmartApps & Automations
1

Is there any interface available (or planned) to allow a SmartApp to interact with the rooms? For example, can I get a list of rooms, or limit my device selection to things in a specific room.

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2

And/Or even a SmartApp method to find out what Room a Device is in?

(Funnyā€¦ I was just talking about this with @625alex last night.).

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3

Guessing there is, given the resolution of: "groovy.lang.MissingPropertyException: No such property: type for class: physicalgraph.group.cassandra.Room
Possible solutions: name"
in the IDE

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4

Nice, how did you get that? I tried .Room on a device, but that gives me

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Property 'Room' is not supported for devices
5

It would probably still be called ā€œ.groupā€, but Groups/Rooms are actually an associative Object, I think, and we havenā€™t been given the APIā€¦ At least, not documented.

6

Ha, didnā€™t say I knew hot to access it!
Clearly it exists since itā€™s being used in the new app. As @tgauchat mentioned, we donā€™t know the calls for it yet.

7

There are a lot of client API calls available to the mobile App and graph.api.smartthings.com web pages that are not available or not published for use in SmartApps or Device Handlersā€¦ And may never be.

But I do speculate that ā€œRoomā€ is not a new Objectā€¦ It is really just ā€œGroupā€, though it may have been extended for the new App. Doesnā€™t help us, though, because we never had access to the Group ID.

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8

We need this.

With people grouping devices into rooms, they are using names that are relative to that room instead of relative to the whole house. ā€˜Bedroom floor lampā€™ becomes ā€˜floor lampā€™ in the bedroom room.

We need this for organization and identification in the rule builder apps, but also for things like the Amazon Echo. Now that I have 3 devices named ā€˜floor lampā€™, Alexa canā€™t figure it out.

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9

Looked through a bunch of threads discussing this, how is such a basic feature missing from the API? Iā€™d expect, at the very least, a way to query for the label of a room/group by itā€™s id, instead I have to set this up as a hardcoded map or some convoluted preference?

I mean really, I have 50+ devices, how is that manageable without some grouping/room support. It would be really nice to have a way to query for app allowed devices by room instead of capability. Who actually wants to see a list of 30 lights, instead show me a list of 6 rooms with the lights in each room? ( Just an example ).

The samsung official app can do this, why not surface functionality to the developers?

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10

this will get groupId and assumes a device is only in one group::

def logDeviceInfo() {
    settings.each { k, v ->
        settings.get(k).each {
            log.debug "id: ${it.id}, name: ${it.name}, groupId: ${it.device.groupId}"
        }
    }
}

}

group name is not available via smartapp. thereā€™s this page which has a userā€™s groups, but it only works when the user is logged in: https://graph.api.smartthings.com/api/groups

this thread has more info: Accessing group within a SmartApp

11

Thanks @djkrite Iā€™m using something like this ( what I meant by hard coded mapping, groupId to human readable label. ) This works fine for me but not really for a platform that should be getting way more serious by now about supporting their developer ecosystem to foster integrations. Anyways, I do appreciate the reply :slight_smile:

12

i agree. group name should be available. i figure this is more of a business decision than a technology decision. i ended up writing a method to find the highest occurring word in the devices assigned to a group and then use that word as the group name. the method excludes words like: room, light, switch, etcā€¦

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13

Iā€™m going to resurrect this old topic to check whether the rooms ever got exposed via the API. Anyone have any updates on this?

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14

Iā€™d like to bump this again. Can anyone with knowledge of future plans for the API share anything?