Need some quick dirty help

I am having an issue with my freezer thawing when it shouldn't. So I put a SmartThings button in there to monitor the temperature changes. Unfortunately my Hubitat Logs only go back about 12 hours.

I would like to log the descriptionText attribute to a local file. When I say the file contents are:

%date% | %descriptionText%

It will give me the Date and then say Null.

How can I get descriptionText to write to the local log file?

How are you doing this? Based on your description, I would assume a rule. In that case, %descriptionText% is not a "built in" RM variable. Your options there are %device%, %value%, %time%, and %date%, all of which would refer to the last device to trigger the rule. if you want to simulate what "description text"/info logging normally provides, you could probably use something like this with a "changed" trigger: "%device% is %value%", prefaced with "%date% | " if you also want that.

You could use node-Red which will log all events to a file. It sounds more complex than it is. I've written a short script that logs all data to a csv file on my computer. Then I look at the data with excel (or just a text editor).

You would have to install java.js (simple download and install).
then Node red ( a few more steps but again not a lot of investigation is required)
Import a script and let it run.

There is a section in this forum for NodeRed. The folks there are much more capable than I.

John

There's a new local file system that could help. I've not tried anything like this, but the launch description said you could write data to a file (on the hub) that works much the same as local variables.

That's were I would research.

As @michael.l.nelson said, it’s easy to use the built in local file system and then access the file in File Manager in Settings. I log a temperature to a text file and it works great.

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