Re: xAP BSC Questions for a MediaPortal Plugin

[James Traynor <james@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

DisplayText= is a completely optional element in a BSC message. It is
there to provide a label/annotation for events mainly for display
purposes. An example may be a door sensor that would just respond On/Off
but could also have a displaytext saying "Door is
closed","Door is
Open". The important thing is that displaytext is designed for the
human
to read where as the state/level/text are there for the applications to
read.
In homeseer it sends the devicestatus as the displaytext and because of
how things work in home seer some users/devices put html in there so it
display nice on the webpage. That is why you are seeing a url in there.
The only other non-standard additions I've seen are again from HomeSeer.
I added a Name= and a Location= keys ( if available). This was to allow
apps like Floorplan when they autodetect the BSC devices to
automatically name them.
Regarding temperature. They really don't fit in well with BSC and
because of this work is underway on TSC which is a schema design for
telemetry devices. Its been through a few revisions now so should be out
soon. As it stands a temp device in homeseer would just report the temp
within the Tex= field. If more data was needed to be sent a seperate BSC
device would need to be used for each item of data. So a temperature
could be sent as:
:tempA.Temp
:tempA.MaxTemp
:tempA.MinTemp
hardly ideal, hence TSC!

hth, and welcome to the group

James
ptgxap wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> First post and I already have questions :)
>
> I am working on a plugin for
> MediaPortal(http://www.team-mediaportal.com/)
> to control xAP BSC devices and had some questions.
> (Using the xAPFramework btw)
>
> I was wondering if there were common conventions
> used in the BSC messages that are not part of the
> spec but are used commonly.
>
> One example I gathered from reading some posts is that
> a URL to an image is passed in the "DisplayText" via
> the HomeSeer plugin. I was going to let users show this
> image but was not sure what it represented.
> Is this a "Stateful" image or a general image representing
the device?
>
> Another question is temp control.
> I know the BSC schema does not support a min value
> but is there a common way this is handled?
> Again for example, does HomeSeer have temp devices that are
> xAP enabled via the connector plugin?
> If so, how are these handled?
>
>
> Thanks for any help!
> patrick
>
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