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ETS Professional Feature Requests

Allowing for building function import and GA creation to ensure that building functions are used

Christian Mjaanes
BACKGROUND:
Your intentions behind introducing "Building functions" and "Device channels" are good. It can be a brilliant feature. However, if I have understood the concept correctly it is hard to use in a day-to-day environment for the following reasons:
- Lack of control over the grouping (lack of making deliberate white spaces/holes in the group address sequencing, lack of control over the naming of group addresses, e.g.standards including the room-ID/lamp-ID, etc).
- Lack of being able to import a list of functions as groups addresses (you have to create a function from the building view in ETS itself). Nowadays, most professionals use tools or home-made Excel spreadsheets that automatically create logical groups of group addresses and names them according to your personal preference).
 
 
 
 
THEREFORE, A BETTER SOLUTION WOULD BE TO .....
Allow for import of building functions and the creation of GAs underneath a building function
 
A much simpler solution would be to allow users to import my own named business functions into the building view. Users should be able to specify (in the import file):
a) The name of the business function
b) Where (in the building view) to attach the business function
c) The group addresses (GAs) that should be placed underneath this business function
d) Decide the GA_Names for the GAs mentioned under item c)
 
Whether the GAs (mentioned in point c) and their names (mentioned in point d) should be required to exist from before as legal GAs in ETS or whether they should be created upon (as part of) the import process is not important (do what is easiest for you....both will work fine for the user). 
 
With this (and with the right export/import format), the users can import group addresses directly into ETS and at the same time import the named business functions that our Excel help-sheets will have created automatically.
 
Yes, I know we can pay a lot of money to buy ETS apps that probably allow for such import as described above, but that should really not be necessary. It should be a standard import function in ETS to do this (just like importing og GAs work today).
 
What is more important, if you allow for such import, maybe the use of building function could have a real boost. It is my opinion that this feature (which could be genius) is really not used very much today, simply because of the reasons I mention in the beginning of this post.
 
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  • Stephen Tankard

    I believe Functions is a really under-developed feature of ETS that - with a bit more work - could make the software significantly more user-friendly.

    There are not enough Function types to make the feature really useful.  For example in Lighting, there are only Functions for switchable and dimmable.  Many projects now use Tunable White, RGB, or RGBW lighting and these should also be possible to include as functions.  For temperature control the Functions are very basic with only a few group addresses when in reality many more GAs will likely be needed.  There is no Function for control of an Air Conditioning unit.

    This topic needs a real rethink to make ETS project design faster and more streamlined.

    I believe there was a KNX Association project related to KNX IoT that possibly considered the functions "semantics?" more carefully but at present KNX IoT seems to be progressing very slowly.

     

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