No Value on deploy

[alexsahka]

No Value on deploy

[alexsahka]

I'm a really heavy user of node-red-contrib-hal. Sometimes I feel addicted...

[flic]

I thought about that but in the end decided to not save state in Node-RED, opting to keep state exclusively in MQTT. I didn't want to end up in a scenario where I keep an extra copy of state information in Node-RED and take action based on possible stale data. I might be reconsidering this in the future, but for the moment it isn't possible.

[alexsahka]

When I keep state in MQTT then still there is a short time with - No Value state on deploy.
How to avoid this?

[flic]

Make sure that you configure your MQTT devices with retain=true so that the latest value is retained by MQTT. If you have that configured you should get the value pretty much instantly at startup.

[alexsahka]

Yes, I keep MQTT devices with retain=true, but there is still a short no value period time about 0.5 to 1 sec long.
I use node-red-contrib-hal for lights logic and lights sometimes turning on/off, need to figure out the trigger delay on deploy.
Thanks.

[flic]

Oh okay, I see your point. The short delay never bothered me so I haven't considered it a problem.

[flic]

That's nice to hear, I thought I was the only user! :) I haven't been able to work on it much for the last year or so, so I'm just glad it holds together!

[alexsahka]

Have you ever thought about grouping node-red-contrib-hal: item? For sake of easy finding/sorting?

[flic]

I have. I'm also considering if the item object itself should be a lot more advanced, if it would be useful to be able to define multiple characteristics on an item so that the item node itself knows that MQTT topic */relay/0=on means that the first relay is true and */relay/1=off means that the second relay on the same item is false.

I have the beginnings of a new hal2, but I haven't been able to work on it much lately. Maybe later.

[alexsahka]

Great news.

[flic]

Hey, @alexsahka this might be of interest to you:

https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-hal2

...and yes, it does have persistent storage. ;)

It's a bit different conceptually than the old one so no guarantees that it fits into your work flow or that you like it, but I think it works a lot better myself. You can use them both in parallel, no collisions. The documentation is still a bit lacking unfortunately, but I published a few examples.

[alexsahka]

Thank you! I will try it.