I need to present a complicated UI to configure a plugin. Specifically, I'm writing a "virtual" watering controller that unifies multiple Insteon devices to provide (a) more than 8 channels, and (b) a programming interface accessible to gardeners that are not programmers.

Clearly, the Indigo 5 plugin UI is unsuitable (it has no arrays, no date-and-time UI elements, etc.) So I'm considering configuring the plugin via a webpage. Ideally, of course, I'd be using an Indigo web server plugin. But is it possible in Indigo 5 to have a device plugin that also provides web pages to Indigo's web server? How?

If the answer is no, what approach do you recommend? I suppose I could run my own instance of Cherrypy to provide the UI (on an alternate port)...

Cheers
-- perry

Perry The Cynic wrote:Clearly, the Indigo 5 plugin UI is unsuitable (it has no arrays, no date-and-time UI elements, etc.)

Well, not so clear given you didn't describe what it is you want to do. The plugin UI is limited by design, but it can be flexible enough for many uses.

But, in any event, the original plan was to have IWS plugins also included in the Indigo plugin bundle - and that plugin would also have complete access to the IOM. That way, you could write complex configuration UIs in HTML and present it via IWS.

We ran out of time so that's going to have to wait for another release. In the meantime, you can write a traditional IWS plugin using the "old" IWS api. The problem will be that the IWS API doesn't have access to the IOM. You'll have to figure a way around that.

Whatever happened to the GC plugin?

Well, not so clear given you didn't describe what it is you want to do. The plugin UI is limited by design, but it can be flexible enough for many uses.

It covers the 90-95% case fairly well. I need to express "arbitrary list of schedules, each containing an arbitrary list of channels and durations, plus parallelism constraints and priority rules." If there's a way to make lists of (lists and stuff) in the present configuration UI, please tell me how.

But, in any event, the original plan was to have IWS plugins also included in the Indigo plugin bundle - and that plugin would also have complete access to the IOM. That way, you could write complex configuration UIs in HTML and present it via IWS.

That would be quite handy. Next time, perhaps.

We ran out of time so that's going to have to wait for another release. In the meantime, you can write a traditional IWS plugin using the "old" IWS api. The problem will be that the IWS API doesn't have access to the IOM. You'll have to figure a way around that.

That's why I'm considering running my own Cherrypy that's part of the plugin process. Full access to the IOM, and easy data tie-in to my plugin configuration. And a vain hope that come Indigo 6, I can just drop the Cherrypy host and keep the rest of the code, more or less. It's not that hard.

Whatever happened to the GC plugin?

It's roughly done and working fine, though the configuration UI is a bit ugly. I ended up writing some useful Python runtime to deal with asynchronous operations, which now leaves me in a bit of a quandary about how to license the whole thing. In any case, it's not clean enough to ship yet; though if you have someone desperate, point them at me and we'll work something out.

Cheers
-- perry