Which Came First? The Chicken Mesh or the Connector?

Fair warning, I've asked this question before, but I never got a response and I'm not sure I asked it that clearly. so here is take two of The Mesh Chicken and the Egg.

Say you have a hub variable on hub A. And you need its virtual device (connector) on hub B. As I see it, there are two options:

  1. Create a connector to the hub variable on hub A and then mesh that connector device to hub B. Done.
  2. Mesh the variable itself to hub B and then create a connector device to the meshed variable on hub B. Hmm, that works too.

So which should come first, the hub mesh or the variable connector? (took quite the buildup for that lame joke). But seriously, they both seem to work. Except....

I start with approach 1. But that gave me lots of extraneous variable connectors meshed to secondary hubs (which add noise/overhead to my device list) because of course mesh works at the parent level and drags along all the children. Ick. So I transitioned to approach 2. When I was done, my hub variables interfaced had rows that look like this with a bunch of scary looking nulls:

Mind you, they still all appear to work. I can click on the "null" connector in any row and it brings me to the device details page where the value is correct, not null as indicated in the variable table.

So, did I do something wrong? Is there a best practice that others have found? What's up with the nulls here? Maybe just a UI issue? Or maybe I created a real problem?

Appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Yeah I’ve been trying to reproduce this, and here’s the pattern I found: if there is no connector device on the source hub, then when I create the connector device on the destination hub, I get these nulls in the hubvar interface — even though afaict this creates no bad behavior on the destination’s hubs behavior wrt either the variable or the connector. Previously I had preferred not having the connector on the source hub because I wasn’t using these virtual devices (there) and they just clutter the device UI.

When I add-back the connectors on the source hub, all the nulls disappear and the hubvar UI returns to normal. FWIW.

Yeah great question. It’s because I’m using them with a couple custom apps that only use devices and not variables. Would be cleaner without the connectors for sure.

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