TOO many options, variables, devices!

Forgive me in advance...trying to offer some constructive feedback, and I certainly appreciate all the work that's clearly gone into this plugin.

I may be in the minority here, but IMO this plug-in is a hot mess of WAY too many variables, settings, and devices.

I think it would be helpful if you had a toggle for a more "basic" mode versus "pro" mode, perhaps, or greater control over what is shown and tracked. Maybe what I'm wanting is already there, but it's also not the most intuitive interface.

My interest in this plug-in is simply to know the WiFi connection status of the 4 iPhones in my household, so that I can create some arrive/leave home triggers. Secondarily it's nice to see if my AP's are up, but honestly the Unifi controller app already provides this functionality and notifications.

I don't need 500 entries for "neighbors", and while I see that I can ignore NEW neighbors, I still have 500 "old" neighbors now cluttering up my Devices. What's the point of even displaying neighbors in this plug-in anyway? I can't trigger some action based on anything besides a Group's status, as far as I can see. This app is for AUTOMATION, not reporting, and the existing Unifi tools do a fine job of reporting already.

I don't need 20 groups and therefore 100 extra variables cluttering up my Variables window. I need 2 (or better, let me specify how many I need in the Settings). Spending 5 minutes turning off 100 "remote display" checkboxes is mildly annoying, and God help me if I have a variable that starts with a letter after "U" and have to scroll though that mess to view it.

Even the System section that shows my four AP devices also has a dozen other devices/SSIDs that I don't care about (or even know what they are).

I understand "if you don't like it, don't use it", but unfortunately the only two other plugins that do network device status don't work well at all, so this seems to be my only option for something that should be fairly simple to accomplish ("is device X connected to my wifi right now?").

If I'm using it wrong, please educate me, or if there's already some ways to clean this all up, I'd love to know them. Thanks in advance.

jstewart30, thanks for the feedback

yes somethings could have been done differently, The plugin has grown over time .

here some answers to your specific questions, suggestions:
>> too many variables, settings, and devices.
some want less some want more options,, the default should satisfy most, when you start you get more info and then you can reduce taht.
>> I still have 500 "old" neighbors now cluttering up my Devices.
you can simply delete the devices , first set in config, do not accept new ..
Same for regular unifi devices /clients

>>I don't need 20 groups ...
I just posted a version where you can set the variable folder name. Before you could create a folder and move these variables there and any new variable would be created in that folder.
This new way makes it a little clearer, was trying to be fancy with the options - different folder options for different groups of variables (groups vs other settings)
.. and making the number of groups dynamic would add another option in config .. and you can move the unwanted groups into a eg unifi_junk folder

>>Even the System section that shows my four AP devices...
The switches & AP have several ports that come with their own MAC#s. As the unifi devices are not very consistent in their schema (info in the database dicts) I have decided to create a devices for each mac#. It looks as if eg unifi gw and unifi gw pro software was developed by different teams and the dict structures are really different.

I too have about 300 unifi devices in indigo. What I do is, I move the devices I want into a folder "unifi devices" and let the plugin create anything new in the default folder (unifi_created)

I have thought about hiding some of the options in the menus .. like "experts only". Will think about that, but that is not a trivial exercise which category should an option go into..?

Karl

Hey Karl,
Thanks for the response and suggestions. As an amateur developer myself I always hesitate criticizing people's work (especially when it's done free), so I appreciate your grace with the feedback.

I would suggest a few new settings to consider for the future that I think would help make the plug-in a little more elegant:

1. "Show/Ignore Neighbors" - (not just new neighbors...again I'm not sure what the point of even displaying neighbor data in this plug-in is, since I don't seem to be able to do anything with it. Again, rather than trying to replace what's already fairly well done with UniFi's existing app and controller of just reporting statuses, keeping the plug-in focused on Automation aspects seems cleaner. Either let me DO something if a neighbor appears, like change a AP's channel or alert me, or give me the option to just take neighbors out entirely...I shouldn't have to have that folder, even if I'm emptied it)

2. "Show/Ignore System" might also be a reasonable thing to add. I don't SEE a way to trigger anything based on a System status anyway, so why even show them? If it's purely to display status I guess that's somewhat handy, but otherwise it's the same issue as with the neighbors above. At minimum let me DO things based on the status of the System items (maybe it already can and I'm just missing it?)

3. "Delete expired clients after X days" (it's fine that I can go in and clean things up manually, but part of the beauty of programming is that we can automate things and make life easier, so having the plug-in purge old data automatically would be nicer).

4. Let the user specify the number of groups and therefore variables. Doesn't seem difficult from a programming standpoint and forcing exactly 20 groups (each with 4 variables) is fairly inelegant. I appreciate that I can tuck them away in a folder but they should ideally just not exist at all. Or at minimum let me delete them and not have them be recreated. Forcing 80+ variables on the user, whether they want or need them, is...not...great.

5. Honestly even better than #4 above, the whole way you handle Groups in variables is fairly inelegant as well. Rather than having pre-set trigger actions of "oneHome" "oneAway" etc based on Variables, it would be cleaner/better to just let me create a Virtual Device group of clients myself, and then just enable that to be "on" or "off" in a Trigger based on if they're connected to the network or not. I don't even really see the need for these Variables. That also fits much better with the way Indigo works with other devices.

I don't think you necessarily need an "Expert vs Basic" mode, so much as just a bit control up front in terms of what is displayed. And maybe a bit of re-thinking of the variables/groups/triggers approach, which I think would be cleaner and more intuitive.

Ultimately it's helpful to know that I can just delete most things manually to clean this up, and/or tuck things into folders, so I appreciate that guidance. And thank you again for the work of creating this in the first place...I'm glad to have A solution to my problem, even if it's a little messy.

I sort of agree in principle with jstewart30, I was also sort of a bit lost when I installed this plugin and wanted to configure it. But actually once I did that it was fine. I instinctively did what Karl suggested above, I deleted all the neighbor devices and moved the devices I care to a separate folder.

The "Show/Ignore Neighbors" option seems like a good suggestion, perhaps even make the default to Ignore Neighbors so as not to scare new plugin users.

"Delete expired clients after X days" is not something I would want to do. I wrote some code that creates a variable for every new UniFi wifi device. Then when new Wifi wifi devices join my network I can compare to see if they are already exist or not, if they don't exist on my variables folder I can send an email alert. This basically helps me protect my Wifi network as I will know if anyone gets access to my wifi network.

"Let the user specify the number of groups and therefore variables" => not too bothered by this, specially after the new version that puts them on a variables folder.

"Expert vs Basic" mode. I would actually go in a different way. I haven't done any plugins but I presume the configuration has to be a single screen. As such I will suggest putting the minimum required parameters for the plugin to work at the top, under a basic configuration section. Leave things that can take defaults out of this section. That should make it a lot easier to configure and understand.

Thanks for the great plugin and constant development/update efforts!