WebThings Schema, Display UUID as Fixed Text Element

WebThings
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#1

Good evening everyone.
I’ve made several BME680 Sensor Modules for a small non-profit and outfitted a RPi4 with the gateway installed to present a display of the environmental conditions within an assisted work warehouse. So far all is working as expected.
The senior operations manager has asked if each ESP8266-BME680 module, programmed with the WebThings framework, can display a unique UUID as they wish to extract and differentiate that data at a later stage for further processing and logging. The UUID implementation is straightforward but i can’t find an example of a Thing being described with a easily shown UUID. Any pointers where I can look for an example or a reference as to how to approach this request. The ThingProperty “text” displays as a truncated string, which can be edited. I need it to be shown as the full 37 character ascii string, (16 hex bytes), and fixed, not editable.

Thanks in advance.

#2

Not sure this is the same identifier, but if you mouse over a thing, the URL shows a uniq id. I’ve used this id to trigger/set thing values by remote applications. As you stated, when I was looking for this id value I could not find it easily until I saw it when about to click on the GUI thing item…

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#3

Hi @Antonio,

I’m afraid the truncation is a UI limitation of WebThings Gateway which doesn’t have a quick fix, but is something we can improve in the future.

You can make a property of a thing read-only by setting "readOnly": true in its description. See https://webthings.io/api/#property-object

However, properties are really designed for attributes of devices which change, whereas a unique ID is more static metadata.

A thing has an id member which is used to specify a unique identifier, which is always a URI of some kind. You could include the UUID in this URI to identify a particular device. Those IDs are not currently displayed in the WebThings Gateway user interface (except in the URL bar and by hovering over a link to a thing as @EricEdberg noted), but they are exposed through the API if you want to make use of them in the future.

Alternatively you could just add a read-only property as described above.

Hope this helps

Ben

#4

Hi Ben.

Thanks for the idea. I’ll give it a try.