Possible New Schema: status.basic

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm looking at an app to decode the Sky Digibox data packets, and getting
some good results - the problem now comes of getting this information out
onto the xPL network.

To my mind, this sort of information is highly specific, and not really
suited to a more "general" schema - the digibox produces one set
of data,
another sat or cable box will produce a very different set, possibly even
without overlap.

It got me thinking about the options - I could either produce a specific
class/type of "digibox.basic", or look at a more general
"status.basic"
packet. I think that the highly specific schema that we have at the moment
are probably the least useful of the schema we have just now.

So... The thought is - produce a status.basic schema with the purpose of
providing a mechanism which is really only intended to throw a
miscellaneous
set of values across the wire. In essence, this is doing the same sort of
thing as we did with sensor.basic and control.basic - rather than having a
multitude of switch.basic, slider.basic etc.. We opted for a single
sensor.basic with a "type=" field.

I'd propose:

xpl-trig for status changes
xpl-stat for regular heartbeat status updates

And an xpl-cmnd mechanism to request the status, now please.

status.basic
{
device=
type=
[
Developer specified tags/values
]
}

This lends itself to the XML description as well - basically, the message
body is freeform, but we come up with a set of these descriptions so that
xplhal etc can make sensible use of the elements added.

I'd like some feedback on this one please?

Ian.