Unable to add extra items, web ui limit reached?

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Hi there,

I have ran into a strange problem. When adding items to a page in the front end of Pimatic by pressing the ‘+’ next to a item in the selection section nothing seems to happen, the plus sign doesn’t change into a ‘✓’. I am able to make changes to items and rules, I just don’t seem to be able to add new ones. The pimatic-deamon log doesn’t output anything related. Also after adding a rule the rule doesn’t show up at the rules page. Therefore I get the feeling that I may have ran into a limit of sorts. Does any one have a idea what is going on?

@zomer How many items do you have on the page? Have you tried adding to a new page?

About 130 or so. I have this one page where I add anything that isn’t really in use, but that I do like to be able to check or control at times. Adding items to new or less cluttered pages also does not work. I tried did edit the config from the terminal and removed at least 20 items. But then the problem still occurred. Running Pimatic with an older config from about a month ago did work out. I also checked the config in a json validator and all was well.

@zomer And what happens when you add new items in config.json directly? both new devices and devices added to the heavily loaded page?

Reason for asking: This could help distinguish between and back-end and front-end (ergo browser) problem. Also using different browsers would help pinpoint.

Currently I am not aware of back-end limitations. Running into memory issues for all the objects could be a cause but quite unlikely.

@dan I have discovered something interesting thanks to your suggestion to try an other browser. I tried internet explorer, and does not display anything after logging in, only the blue title that says ‘Pimatic Homeautomation’. Then I removed all cookies and other history from my default browser firefox, and the same happened. I guess this will probably give you a good idea of what might be going on?

@zomer Unfortunately not. Chances are this is browser or client-firewall related though. The browser will connect to the rest-api of the backend. What happens if you enter http://<pimatic-ip>[:<port>]/api/devices in Firefox ? Does this give you a JSON object of all devices?

@dan said in Unable to add extra items, web ui limit reached?:

/api/devices

Never saw that url, but it does successfully give me a list of all my devices

@zomer Then we have learned your client can successfully reach the backend, and the backend (read Pimatic server) processes request and returns data successfully.

This leaves the receiving/processing/interpretation of the data by your browser as the area to investigate. What goes on I cannot tell from here…

also try: http://<ip-address/api/pages if the JSON returned does correctly contain all devices per-page, it is a clear indication of a browser-processing issue. Alternatively do a curl -X GET --user "<user>:<passwd>" http://<pimatic-ip>/api/pages in a console on the Pimatic server, and compare results.

Update: Try disabling any browser add-ons you may have loaded?

https://pimatic.org/api/actions/

With the curl or wget command on the pi itself I’ll get a small 11 kB file with some legit devices. But from the browser on an other pc I’ll get 560 kB of device info. Also disabled pi-hole running on an other pi, but that did not change anything. the pi where pimatic runs on doesn’t have its DNS configured to go trough the pihole.

@zomer said in Unable to add extra items, web ui limit reached?:

With the curl or wget command on the pi itself I’ll get a small 11 kB file with some legit devices. But from the browser on an other pc I’ll get 560 kB of device info. Also disabled pi-hole running on an other pi, but that did not change anything. the pi where pimatic runs on doesn’t have its DNS configured to go trough the pihole.

Getting a smaller response locally than remote sounds really odd! did you write out to file directly, e.g. >devices.out or copy from the terminal like putty?
560k remotely would yield roughly 76.000 lines of formatted JSON (based on extrapolation I did on my prod instance (84k file). Is this correct?!

thats what I did yes: curl -X GET --user “user:password” http://192.168.1.10/api/pages > apipagesterminal

@zomer said in Unable to add extra items, web ui limit reached?:

thats what I did yes: curl -X GET --user “user:password” http://192.168.1.10/api/pages > apipagesterminal

How did you get the 560k file remotely? Would love to be able to see the output of both files and your config.json

UPDATE: 560k file would translate to 45k lines of pretty-formatted JSON, but still…

Another lead of investigation:
You mentioned your config from ~1 month ago still worked.
What changed / How bout incrementally reapply changes on top of working config until issue re-occurs (making sure to keep all other variables equal) ?

sharing the output from the api/pages the terminal and the browser seems less than ideal as it contains a couple of passwords and other personal details, I think reapplying the backups one by one will provide a solution. It just seems as if it will be quite a big job, as restarting pimatic takes about 3 minutes and after each time, I would need to check to see if the behavior still takes place. But well, I have two quiet night shifts ahead, so I guess I can carve out some time.

I found the bugger. The behavior was caused by a recently added raspbee device/scene:

{
      "class": "RaspBeeGroupScenes",
      "name": "Scenes for Alle lampen van het hele huis",
      "id": "scene_raspbee_g53f12e5871ce894ecaf59823bca347a010_10",
      "deviceID": 10,
      "buttons": [
        {
          "id": 1,
          "name": "Vol Aan",
          "text": "Vol Aan"
        },
        {
          "id": 2,
          "name": "Helemaal uit",
          "text": "Helemaal uit"
        }
      ]
    }                                                                              |      }

Removed it, problem solved now, thanks for your help @Dan