I am using SharpTools connected to my SmarThings hub for my home automation. I am also using the IotaWatt Power Monitor system for which I have been using a webCore piston to access its Query API that uses a restful interface that produces a table of JSON or CSV data.
I am in the process of migrating this webCore piston to SharpTools. To test that things work, I have tried replacing a typical HTTP GET request and assignment to a variable in webCore that works fine shown below:
Unfortunately I do not get any data assigned to the SharpTools variable, whether I use a String or Numeric variable. In the Rule logs on the last command I get that “Set variable value: $TestTotalPowerWatts = undefined”. If I highlight in the Rule listing the $TestTotalPowerWatts variable I get a <> tooltip response and if I highlight the $context.response.data.total_power item, I get a “Available response data.” tooltip response.
If you take the URL from your HTTP GET action and put it directly into your browser, what does the response look like?
I noticed that in the WebCoRE version, you were using the raw $response whereas in SharpTools you are trying to access a property of an object within the response (eg. trying to access a total_power JSON property within the response body).
Edit: I also noticed that you mentioned that the API can provide a CSV or JSON response, but in your example it looks like the URL is configured for ‘format=csv’ rather than json?
So, indeed if I put the URL from my HTTP GET action in a browser, the response is a number (the power in Watts), say: 1079.
I have also tried a version of the URL with &format=json in which case the browser response is: [[1079]].
Re your comment: " I noticed that in the WebCoRE version, you were using the raw $response whereas in SharpTools you are trying to access a property of an object within the response (eg. trying to access a total_power JSON property within the response body).". That’s correct, but how else could I assign in the SharpTools Rule the response from the HTTP GET Action to a SharpTools variable? That might solve the problem.
That’s a weird JSON response, but it basically evaluates to an array within an array.
Edit: After reviewing their documentation, it looks like the idea is that it’s a time-series potentially of multiple different series of data which is why it yields an array within an array.
So you could use $context.response.data[0][0] to grab the inner nested value. I believe that would look like the following when you are prompted for which attribute you want to use:
A key point here is that the raw response in your browser would have had to look exactly like you mentioned:
[[1079]]
If it was instead an array within an object as their documentation mentions:
{
"data": [[series1,series2,..],[series1…]]
}
Then you would likely need the input data key to be: data[0][0]
–
Alternatively, if you just want to assign the raw value from the CSV version you could do that using an expression:
Normally, when you assign the response data from an HTTP request, it makes you choose a property as most API responses are structured JSON rather than just raw text, but expressions allow us to access the top-level, raw response data directly. We’re not actually taking advantage of all the neat features of expressions here, but it’s a trick to get the raw data (and it handles implicit conversions to the target variable type).
