Some plugins may represent entity IDs as integers, while the database
maps external IDs to strings. This may result in entities being
incorrectly mapped during merging. Casting to string prevents these
type-related ambiguities.
The UI relies on these events upon refresh to detect if a device is
still reacheable. Therefore, we shouldn't mask them if we don't detect
any changes with the current entity configuration/state.
If an event comes from an entity that hasn't been persisted yet on the
internal storage then we wait for the entity record to be committed
before firing an event. It's better to wait a couple of seconds for the
database to synchronize rather than dealing with entity events with
incomplete objects.
- Added cache support to prevent duplicate EntityUpdateEvents
- The cache is smartly pre-populated and kept up-to-date, so it's
possible to trigger events as soon as the entities are published by
the plugin (not only when the records are flushed to the internal db)
Fabio Manganiello