Inherit thing shapes to thing shapes

You can't do it out of the box.

We do it, but the solution it's a bit complex: third "Compound" Thing Shape can subscribe to ThingStart Event* and add the depending ThingShapes with Resources["EntityServices"].AddShapeToThing, something like:

var meName = me.name;

if (Things[meName].ImplementsShape({ thingShapeName: "DependingThingShape" })===false) {
 Resources["EntityServices"].AddShapeToThing({
 name: meName,
 thingShapeName: "DependingThingShape"
 });
}

You can see that I use Things[meName]. instead of me. That's very important as when you add a ThingShape to a Thing it automatically restarts and the reference to me. isn't valid anymore on the same service call.

* That's the easy part, the hard part here it's that you can't have more than one subscription to the same event on the same thing 😞 then you can only apply this approach to one compound ThingShape per Thing. Having multiple subscriptions to the same event on the same thing was a feature removed on TW 6.5 😞 I had long discussions with R&D about this, and I think there's plans for new releases to get back this functionality. In the meantime here we have a solution too: We have a general ThingShape (let's name it GenericThingShape) which it's implemented by all the Things and it's the only one that subscribes to ThingStart event and with naming conventions it calls Init_"ThingShapeName" for each Implemented ThingShape (same can apply with ThingTemplates), the code looks something like:

var sName;
// -- Initialize Implemented Shapes
thing = Things[thingName];
var implementedShapes = thing.GetImplementedShapes();
var nImplementedShapes = implementedShapes.rows.length;
for (var i=0;i<nImplementedShapes;i++) {
 var shape = implementedShapes.rows[i];
 if (shape.name!=="wupGenericTS") {
 sName = "Init_"+shape.name;
 thing = Things[thingName];
 if (thing[sName]!=undefined) {
 times = 0;
 executed = false;
 lastError ="";
 while ((!executed)&&(times<MAX_REPEAT_TIMES)) {
 thing = Things[thingName];
 times++;
 try {
 thing[sName]();
 executed=true;
 } catch(err) {
 lastError = (""+err);
 // -- We are wainting to see it at the end it runs, for other errors we will stop.
 if (lastError.indexOf("is not running")<0) {
 break;
 }
 // -- Let's pause a bit to wait until it's running again.
 pause(5);
 }
 }
 if (executed==false) {
 logger.error("[wupGenericTS("+thingName+")].Init Error calling ThingShape Initialization Service ["+sName+"], "+times+" retries. ERROR: "+lastError);
 }
 }
 }
}