I am a fan of the potential for the Rooms feature, but I would also like to see it progress beyond the current setup. For that to happen it will take more than my private wishes, we all need to contribute. So don't be shy... If only to support the idea of another Community member, pile on and offer suggestions to see Rooms take off and define Hubitat Elevation like it should.
Detail your suggestions for the expansion of the Rooms feature below as responses to this post. I will include them in the list below, but will first let any discussion play out to completion, allowing a logical conclusion to be reached on whether the suggestion holds water.
For my contribution:
Default lights group setup based on lights linked to a Room
Motion Sensor Zone setup based on Motion Sensors linked to a Room
I’ll make again the same suggestion I made when Rooms were first introduced: allow devices to be in multiple rooms simultaneously.
Use case: in large open plan houses, where there are no walls between the dining room, living room, and kitchen, some lights (track lights, arrays of pendant lights, etc) span multiple rooms. This is not the same as groups. I was ridiculed when I made the suggestion before, told it would never be adopted. I can accept that, it’s not my company. But perhaps the passage of time has caused reflection.
I don't see why anyone would ridicule that, it seems like obvious functionality. I don't live in a large, open plan house and I still have lights that border two rooms.
I still vote for getting rid of the rooms concept altogether in favor of a more flexible generic tagging system with filtering. This is largely a selfish request, as I don't group things by physical location, so "rooms" isn't useful for me.
Why limit it to "rooms"?
If you could add arbitrary tags to devices, and then filter the view based on tag (or better, multiple tags), you could cover hundreds of grouping and use case scenarios.
Want to see all battery devices? Add a battery tag to battery devices (or maybe have the system automatically do that..) and filter that way.
Want to group by physical location (aka "rooms")? No problem you could still do that.
Want to group by logical function regardless of location? Add that tag.
Want to do ALL OF THE ABOVE? No problem, after you tag your stuff just change your filter to see what you want!
This is what I've been asking for. It would be wonderful to collapse or sort the list based on "Device type" or "Connection type" or whatever we want, rather than have to take up valuable character space prepending letters or symbols.
I agree you idea does have merit. Thank you for posting. It is most unfortunate for users here to have such an experience, I agree though that I have seen it before.
I want to find @thebearmay 's contributions in this space, but can't find them in recent posts..... such a shame.... Anyway, hopefully the additional data elements will provide some of the requests made here already, obviously with the need for internal systems to make use of these.
Are you saying that the hub's software should automatically recognise capability grouping, otherwise it's just another tag. Wasn't sure why Rooms need be a special case either? To me it's just another additional or alternative way of categorising
I'd prefer a truly flexible tagging system where tags can be used as primary and secondary sort and collapse indices. Isn't it easier to implement as well? However I could live with the way you summarised as long as tags can be used as filters in the UI
Yes anyway I was already agreeing with Jason's in my first post in the thread, which sounds more instinctive to me than your OP that builds on the existing system. But there may be things that I've not thought of. Just my gut feel and normal approach to these things.
).
) It seems like tags are a thing....
