getting date/time stamp from property

[Richard Naninck]

My HVAC thermostats communicate wireless to my PC interface. About every 20 minutes I get a status update from all of the 10 thermostats. The updates are not all at the same time, but time spaced. It happens sometimes that I loose contact with a unit and I cannot test that unless I look at respective properties that get updated by my script upon a received message.

It would be nice to be able to read a timestamp from a property. I could then setup some code where I get the properties time stamp and test it against Time(Now). If a property time stamp is older than lets say 1 hour, something is wrong and I could produce some kind of caution message.
I can build all of this myself by setting up a time property for all thermostat devices and update that property when a message is received, but since the time is already there, I was wondering if something like this could be created.


EMail reply from Scott:

That's actually a feature that I've had in mind from day one. I wanted to be able to access a Property Value history from a Task or Script. The example that I always think of is if someone was entering a four digit code and having a Task/Script test to see if the code was correct. In addition to the correct sequence of digits, it would also need to check the time span between the first and last digit.

Needless to say, it was never implemented. One of the reasons was that it didn't fit well into the simple property name/value pairing. It's easy enough to ask for a script function to return a single value, but I don't know how to have it return multiple. For scripts, I could probably return some kind of composite/delimited string using a delimiter supplied to the function that included both the value and the time/date of the last change.

Other ideas to use this are welcome!