Traits

Specific properties and methods are defined by Traits. A Thing can implement properties and methods from several traits. Children are also scoped to specific traits.

A Trait is a set of properties and methods that are related to a purpose. For example, the OnOff trait provides the concept of being on or off, whereas the Level trait provides the concept of a dimmer switch or volume knob. These traits expose distinct behaviors that are independent from the Light trait which provides additional properties for correlated color temperature and sRGB values, but none that are suitable substitutes for the properties provided by OnOff and Level: the Light trait is designed to be used alongside these traits.

Some traits, like the Scene trait, define children. In the case of the Scene trait, each child thing represents a scene that can be recalled, modified, or deleted. A "save" method is also provided by the trait to allow the current state to be saved to a new or existing scene.

Traits are scoped to be as general as practical so that they can be applied to many different sorts of things. For example, the Level trait could be applied to a light bulb to control dimming, or applied to a ceiling fan to control speed, or to a window controller to control how far open the window is.

Each trait is defined to have both a human-readable name (OnOff, Level, Keychain), a short trait-id ("onof", "levl", "keyc"), and a unique URI identifier.

Trait Definitions

Traits definitions are specified in a JSON format. This trait definition can then be translated into either markdown documentation, Rust, or Java using the som-trait-conv tool.

Splot provides the following collections of trait definitions:

Core Traits (core): Traits which are fundamental to the Splot Object Model.
Standard Traits (std): Traits which represent behaviors which are common enough to be standardized.
Automation Traits (auto): Traits related to automation.
Security Traits (sec): Traits related to the Splot Security Model.