Owner's Manual (Complete)

The Home Control Assistant 1
Chapter 22
Status Export
Up until now most of what we have been concerned with was getting signals in and out of HCA.
Signals from events – powerline transmissions, weather data, clock time – into HCA, worked on,
and then signals sent from HCA.
In this chapter we look at getting information out of HCA that doesn't control anything but rather is
a way for you to see what is happening in your home.
Status Export Overview
What status export does is very simple, why you want to use it may be a bit harder to grasp.
Status exports reads what HCA calls a Template File, processes it, and produces what HCA calls a
Result file. That's all that it does.
What’s in the template file? Anything you want. Anything that is not a placeholder is copied
directly from the template file to the destination file.
Placeholders are evaluated and the result is placed in the destination file. Status export knows
what a placeholder is because they all start and end with the percent character. Between the
starting and ending percent signs is an HCA expression – the same sort of thing you use in the
Compute element. See the expression chapter to learn about HCA expressions.
Some example place holders are:
%_weather(InsideTemp)%
%_State("Table lamp")%
When HCA processes the template, it takes whatever is between percent signs and evaluates it in
the same manner that the Compute and Compute test element does. Then it changes the result to
text and writes that to the Result file.
In the above example, the first might evaluate to "80" and the second to "1".
Configuring Status Export
To setup status export, press the “Status Exports” button in the ribbon Design category. The status
export setup dialog appears as: