Discussion: State of Thing>Location and what to do with it

[eikowagenknecht]

Current state

In OH3 we have two concepts for "Location".

1. Semantic Model (MainUI: “Model”):
   • Location
   • Point
   • Property
   • Equipment

The Location from the Semantic Model is a new concept in OH3 and is used for various things.

2. Things (MainUI: “Things”):
   • Location

The Location parameter of a Thing has been used for the Control area of PaperUI but is not used for anything in OH3.

The problem

The current state with two "Location" concepts is confusing (see e.g. https://community.openhab.org/t/is-location-in-a-thing-still-used-for-anything-in-oh3/116691 for some misconceptions that come up easily).

One goal of openHAB 3 is to be more attractive to novice users and those can be confused most easily.

So I think we should do something about it.

Possible ways forward

I see quite some options here:

• Add the text “(deprecated)” next to it in the UI
• Add a description stating that this is not to be confused with the semantic model and should represent the physical location where the thing is installed
• Only show it for old things in the UI where the field has a non-empty value
• Hide it behind some “show advanced” button like it is done for the less used channels or metadata entries
• Completely remove it from the UI
• Keep it and use it in the thing overview as another thing the list can be filtered by (like @curlyel suggested in the above mentioned thread)
• Completely remove it from OH Core

I'm starting the discussion here because personally I would vote for a complete removal from OH or at least from the UI. That way the least confusion is caused and since it’s not used for anything, backwards compatibility shouldn’t be a major problem here. Though maybe it’s exposed through the API and some 3rd party app or addon uses it for… something? Then I’d probably go with the “show advanced” button in combination with a rename to “Physical Location” and a description that it has nothing to do with the semantic model.

But of cause that’s not my decision to make so I'd like to get the maintainers take on this.

[openhab-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on openHAB Community. There might be relevant details there:

https://community.openhab.org/t/is-location-in-a-thing-still-used-for-anything-in-oh3/116691/16

[monnimeter]

In my opinion there are use cases where the "Thing Location" could be used so it makes sense; one of them I've described in #2210.

From that perspective I would vote for "Hide the Location field behind some 'show advanced' button". We could even thik about having more of those meta information which could be populated by the binding and can be used if we implement a function for "Create Semantic Model from Inbox in one stop" - which is the main Idea behind #2210

I've created a new Topic and I'm linkid it to this, as my "idea" requires more functions in the core than just having the "Location"