Integer/number user variables are not passed as strings in LUA Topic is solved

[boum]

Hi there,

Is there an issue with the documentation there? https://www.domoticz.com/wiki/User_variables#Lua

When using user variables in Lua, keep in mind the following: variables are always stored as a string in the Domoticz database, regardless of their type. The variables are passed in arrays to Lua, at that point they will always be strings also.

I ran a LUA time script, default one and added in the user var loop:

Code: Select all

for variableName,variableValue in pairs(uservariables) do
    print( 'Variable: '.. variableName .. ' = "' .. variableValue .. '" (' .. type(variableValue) .. ')')
end

and I got:

2019-09-16 10:15:00.496 Status: LUA: Time based event fired
2019-09-16 10:15:00.497 Status: LUA: Variable: TestVar = "0" (number)
2019-09-16 10:15:00.497 Status: LUA: Variable: TempMax = "25.5" (number)

TestVar is integer, TempMax is float. None of them are passed in LUA as string as indicated in the Wiki.

Is it a bug? Has the behavior changed recently and the documentation was not updated?
I tried with latest stable 4.10717 on Pi and on 4.11300 on Win.

This question comes from a topic on the french speaking domoticz forum, where an user tried to compare his integer user variable to '0', without tostring or tonumber anywhere. I quickly looked around and found nothing about it here and around.

I wanted to know the official stand on this. Thanks

[waaren]

Is there an issue with the documentation there? https://www.domoticz.com/wiki/User_variables#Lua

When using user variables in Lua, keep in mind the following: variables are always stored as a string in the Domoticz database, regardless of their type. The variables are passed in arrays to Lua, at that point they will always be strings also.

Values for all type uservariables are stored in the database as VARCHAR(200) (= string) but floats and integer types are explicitly converted to float / integer in EventSystem.cpp before passing them to dzVents / Lua. It's been like this since at least 2016-05-15 (cannot see any earlier reference to this using the git blame command)
Please note that in the Lua version used in domoticz, type integer and float are both numbers. Lua only started to include integer types since version 5.3
Please go ahead and feel free to update the wiki accordingly.

[boum]

Thanks.
The source code of domoticz is still largely unknown to me. But with your message, I went and saw that the conversion to Lua number was indeed there when the code was ported from SVN to git (November 2014 it seems). So it's pretty old and that's just the documentation that is out of date.

I followed your advice and changed the Wiki. I also added a link to the relevant dzVent paragraph.

[waaren]

I changed the Wiki. I also added a link to the relevant dzVent paragraph.

Thx !