"republish_on_update": true

[LFrank2021]

Is this a bug or am I misunderstanding this attribute?
I set "republish_on_update": true and was expecting that the plugin will send the data every 5 minutes.
That way I can get them via telegraf and process them into InfluxDB and display them through Grafana.

It worked once for all topics.
Right now only the "is_active" and "climatization_settings*" topics are visible in Grafana and get updated every 5 minutes.
Since those get updated successfully, I thought maybe the plugin only repulishes only these?
I just activated debug and will keep monitoring the logs.
I would expect a "mqtt_client:carconnectivity/xyz" every 5 minutes for all topics.

Any hints will be appreciated.

[tillsteinbach]

Your assumption is correct, if it is not working that way we might see a bug.

[tillsteinbach]

No, updated means the data was fetched or received again. The other event is VALUE_CHANGED.

[LFrank2021]

Why does this look different from the else part?

[tillsteinbach]

This is where it is registering for updates. Without republish_on_update the notification should come only when the value changed. With republish_on_update the plugin registers for when the value is updated (updated means rewritten even without a changed value)

[LFrank2021]

I am just confused, why there is an additional 'Observable.ObserverEent =' in the republish_on_update case.
I do not understand the difference in the syntax between if and else.
I think both ':' and '=' are variable assignments in python, correct?
So observer_flags gets the same information as Obersable.ObserverEvent?
Why does that not interest for the else part?

[tillsteinbach]

Ah, this is just a type hint. Python has no strong typing, but you can still give type hints. This helps to do static code analysis.

[LFrank2021]

Am I maybe looking in the wrong place?
I just activated debug for the whole stack and am seeing messages like this:

2026-03-21T09:11:24+0000:carconnectivity:DEBUG:attributes:Value from the past: level: 2026-03-21 09:06:21.721997+00:00 > 2026-03-20 16:38:00+00:00

Only seeing a few 'Implicitly converting value to' messages but no more mqtt_client outputs.
Except for the already mentioned ones.
Is the main program simply not delivering the new/old values?
Or should mqtt_plugin still do a new push, regardless of what the main program does?

[tillsteinbach]

That is an interesting finding. The connector ignores data from the server with a timestamp that is older than the data it already knows. Because, why would you want older data than you already have and also some clients do not like to have data in a non linear time.
Now the interesting part: where is the old data coming from. Which connector are you using? Can you try deleting the cache file?

[LFrank2021]

The older time stamp should be around the time I parked my car. (-ish!)
With the start of the container I see

2026-03-21T09:01:12+0000:carconnectivity:INFO:carconnectivity:Reading cachefile /tmp/carconnectivity.cache

Which I find strange as it should not retain any data from previous runs.
As it is for the .token:

2026-03-21T09:01:12+0000:carconnectivity:INFO:carconnectivity:Could not use tokenstore from file /tmp/carconnectivity.token ([Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/carconnectivity.token')

As for the version, currently it is the docker.io:latest.

Edit:
And looking into the container I see NOTHING under /tmp...
Which I find weird at the least.

[tillsteinbach]

yes, the log is missing the output that the file is not there. I will add that.
Very confusing that you see those Value from the past messages. That would mean that you first get newer messages and then older messages from the server.

[LFrank2021]

I have an update on this:
I now (think I) understand what is happening here.
When the container starts it pulls the data from the collector WebService and pushes it because this) is not yet true.
After the a few cycles it is true for almost every attribute, which is the case once the car is parked.
The only attribute that always gets refreshed is the connection state.

And that is the reason the mqtt, influx, ... do not push the data anew even if republish is set.
Because the observer never gets an UPDATED trigger.

Fix, what I can imagine (because I want it that way) is a repulish for the carconnectiviy main loop.

            # Value from the past
            if self.republish is not None and self.last_updated is not None and measured is not None and self.last_updated > measured:
                LOG.debug('Value from the past: %s: %s > %s', self.name, self.last_updated, measured)
                return

With that config attribute the main program will always publish the data and you get a new entry in your database, mqtt, .. every 5 minutes. Yes, although the value and timestamp did not change.