Handling Dead Entities and Renamed Entities
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Hello all.. been a minute! I recently rebuilt my Z wave network and migrated to a new z wave stick. In order to prevent any downtime I kept my original z wave network up and ran a docker version of Z Wave JS UI with my new controller. This way I could add device by device without having any devices down.
I finally moved all the devices over to my new stick today. The final step was to migrate everything from my Docker instance of Z Wave JS UI to the HA add-on of Z Wave JS UI. However during this migration some of the names didn't populate correctly which I later managed to import back into Z Wave JS UI. The issue was in Reactor it is stuck on the default names and the entities are not updating. I removed the controller from Reactor, restarted, hard refreshed, and added the controller back however the new entity names have not updated. Also it seems like the old entities from my previous instance of Z Wave JS UI are lingering and not being marked as dead (I believe a certain amount of time needs to lapse before they're marked as dead in Reactor).
My goal is to basically purge all the entities for the 'ZWaveJS' controller in Reactor so it can pull all the updated entity names and only the entities that exist in Z Wave JS UI. I cannot find a quick way to do this, I know entities can be deleted one by one, but with over 100 entities this would take long
I am guessing that if I added the controller with a new name in in the Reactor config it would pull the updated entities and names but I think that would break my rules since the entity IDs would change (I made sure to name all the entities the exact same as they were previously to prevent this issue).
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I don't know if there's a UI option, but when I migrated things, I just stopped reactor, opened the files and removed everything from reactor/storage/entities/zwavejs (after a backup). And start again, of course. It's brutal for sure, but it worked.
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On a mission to automate everything. -
I don't know if there's a UI option, but when I migrated things, I just stopped reactor, opened the files and removed everything from reactor/storage/entities/zwavejs (after a backup). And start again, of course. It's brutal for sure, but it worked.
@therealdb This did the trick thank you!!
Patrick, how should Reactor handle updated entity names and deleted ones for Z Wave JS? With HA it seems fairy instant with a restart that renames and deleted entities are updated but not the case with Z Wave JS.
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Reactor's ZWaveJSController will take the first name it is given and that sticks until you rename it. If you rename it in Reactor, no amount of changing it in ZWave JS will change it in Reactor.
This is by design. It is possible, for example, to use entity names in
getEntity()expressions. If Reactor just changed them on its own like HA, that would break those expressions.By the way, HassController behaves the same way. If the name of a HA entity changes, the corresponding Reactor entity doesn't follow the change. You can see it in the extended attributes of the Reactor entity, but the Reactor entity itself retains the unmodified name.
Deleted entities are marked "dead" in Reactor and will be removed at a later time if they don't reappear. Reactor doesn't immediately remove entities just because the remote hub omits them. Some hubs may not fully enumerate all devices during startup, so removing an entity only to recreate it a few seconds/minutes/hours later would be troublesome. If you're impatient, you can purge dead entities by using the
purge_dead_entitiesaction on the Controller's system entity (give it small age limit, like one second; it only acts on entities that are already marked dead).Author of Multi-system Reactor and Reactor, DelayLight, Switchboard, and about a dozen other plugins that run on Vera and openLuup.
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Reactor's ZWaveJSController will take the first name it is given and that sticks until you rename it. If you rename it in Reactor, no amount of changing it in ZWave JS will change it in Reactor.
This is by design. It is possible, for example, to use entity names in
getEntity()expressions. If Reactor just changed them on its own like HA, that would break those expressions.By the way, HassController behaves the same way. If the name of a HA entity changes, the corresponding Reactor entity doesn't follow the change. You can see it in the extended attributes of the Reactor entity, but the Reactor entity itself retains the unmodified name.
Deleted entities are marked "dead" in Reactor and will be removed at a later time if they don't reappear. Reactor doesn't immediately remove entities just because the remote hub omits them. Some hubs may not fully enumerate all devices during startup, so removing an entity only to recreate it a few seconds/minutes/hours later would be troublesome. If you're impatient, you can purge dead entities by using the
purge_dead_entitiesaction on the Controller's system entity (give it small age limit, like one second; it only acts on entities that are already marked dead).@toggledbits interesting, I totally understand the rationale why the controllers act this way. However, I feel like there are times where you’d want to batch update entities. Could this be added into the UI, similar to the purge dead entities action? Maybe an “update entity metadata” action?