Using dimmable light (LWB006) will cause JSON parse error

[fxbox]

Using dimmable light (LWB006) will cause JSON parse error

[cr]

I was expecting something like this to happen at some point. Unfortunately it's hard to work around reliably, because we don't have adaptive JSON parsing in Rust at this point. You either have to know the data returned beforehand, breaking parsing on every unexpected field – be it by discovering new hardware or by firmware update –, or you have to employ dynamic parsing on every access. That would require turning all the easily-maintable structs into much harder to grasp and maintain parsers.

Not sure yet if there's a good middle ground. For now I'll add the fields as optional, but that process will have to continue for a while. Perhaps white-listing of supported types would be a viable mid-term solution.

[nojunpark]

Just a thought, since the "modelid" field would be present in all types of lightbulb, can we get the modelid value first, and determine which field values to collect based on it? like, of it is LCT007, then we seek for the color values, and if it LWB006, then we seek for dimmer values, and so on. Probably need a separate JSON struct for each type of the bulb I suppose.

Another thing would be that foxbox should not send incorrect commands to the philips hub - for example, currently the on command also sends hue values as well, which the non-color bulbs won't process. (if they simply ignore them, then it should be okay, but the user would be confused if the UI app shows option to change colors for a white dimmer bulb) Maybe keeping track of which type of bulbs are configured could be a good way to avoid this?

but perhaps this bug is outside the scope of the upcoming demo I suppose?

[cr]

Fixed by pull request #174 which implements whitelisting of "Extended color light".

[cr]

The long term solution with support for multiple light types will be implemented for the rewrite on top of the new taxonomy.