Development questions

[mickeprag]

Hi,

I am working on integrating some new hardware into Mycodo and have some questions.

1. Is there planned to support async functions in plugin code?
2. Do input and output plugins need two separate plugins? Or can one plugin define both inputs and outputs?
   2.1. If the answer is two separate, where is the best place to store code common for both types of plugins?
3. Does the measurements_dict/channels_dict has to be known in advance or can it be populated at runtime? If so, how?
4. I want to populate a dropdown at runtime. I can do this for an input plugin since the code is executed before the settings dialog is opened. For an output plugin it will be executed as soon as the plugin is added and will be too late. It might be hard to explain...

Thanks

[kizniche]

Hi. I'll try to answer all I can.

1. Yes, this already can be used, if I understand you correctly. Asyncio is already in use in at least one input module.
2. No, you can combine input and output functionality in one module, though it does help system integration if you do separate these functionalities, since other parts of the system could benefit from accessing these outputs. If the output functionality was integrated into an input module, the output would only be able to use used by that input module.
3. Generally, yes, it needs to be defined when the Python file is loaded. What use case do you have that there will be a variable number of measurements? There are some Input modules that operate with a variable number of measurements (such as MQTT and TTN), which rely on a user input value to determine how many measurements there are, and these can be used as a reference.
4. All inputs need to be defined at the load of the Python file. If you explain the purpose or desired behavior, I can tell you if it can be done.