Owner's Manual (Complete)

The Home Control Assistant 1
Chapter 23
Design Import and Export
This chapter covers a topic much different than other chapters. Rather than discussing features in
HCA that you can use in your own automation solution, this chapter covers a feature that will help
you and others exchange parts of automation designs.
Using
Export Design Elements you select parts of your design to extract and create a new file with.
Using
Import Design Elements you can add to your design a piece of a design created by someone
else.
Design Import and Export Overview
Suppose your design contains a thermostat and you want to have an icon on a display show the
thermostat picture and below it the current temperature. This isn’t too hard. You need to have in
your design a thermostat device and a program that triggers on current temperature reports. Also
that program needs to manage its own icon and use the change icon to select the thermostat icon
and change the text below it to show the temperature using an embedded expression.
Not hard but it takes a bit of work. Suppose you want to share it with other HCA users. This is
what Export Design Elements is for.
The export process is not quite as simple as it would be for exporting some data from a spreadsheet
or database program. This is because so many things in HCA are connected. For example, a
schedule could reference a program, that program reference another program, and those programs
reference some devices, etc. To export the schedule would require assembling a list of all the
items reference by the schedule, any things they reference, etc. This is what the Export Design
Elements wizard does.
Importing, on the other hand, is not very complex, as long as two-part names are enabled. All
things imported go into an Import folder. With two-part names enabled you don’t have to worry
about any name collisions with anything else in your design.