Mealie API Pagination Params

[michael-genson]

Hey there 👋

Found your repo after someone suggested it on my shopping list app; Alexa is killing support for their shopping lists which more or less renders my app useless.

I'm one of the maintainers of Mealie, just wanted to point out a couple things on the API that may be worth modifying:

• You can set the perPage param to -1 to retrieve all records. I saw you had it set to 1000 (which technically breaks if someone has more than 1000 shopping list items... though they probably shouldn't)
• You actually don't need to specify the group_id in the shopping list or meal planner APIs, the group id is inferred from the credentials of the user (which is baked into the API key)

Happy to submit a PR, but I wasn't sure if you wanted a PR or an issue/discussion. I installed this on my HA a few days ago and it's working great so far, love the work here!

[andrew-codechimp]

Hi, thanks for the feedback, I'll make those changes in the next release just to keep things tidy, the group_id goes quite deep into HA config stuff so I'll sort that.

I was also being bitten by Alexa removing lists, I was using AnyList, saw Mealie was self hosted but wanted to continue to have voice so that's how this integration came about. So far Mealie has been a great improvement for what is a quite critical part of my household planning.

A member of the HA Core team has also created a Mealie integration that is going into the July release, this just has calendars at the moment though, but I am collaborating on getting other functionality in, but core have their own way of doing things so it won't be a lift and shift of what I've done here.
https://rc.home-assistant.io/integrations/mealie

[michael-genson]

Ah awesome! Happy to help if I can. I'm with you on household planning - just shouting out when I run out of something in the kitchen/wherever is integral to our home's workflow. I just ordered two ATOM Echoes for HA, we'll see how it goes when they get here.

We just merged a PR which will auto-label new shopping list items when possible, which should help integrations like these. I'm not too familiar with the development side of HA integrations, but if it's feasible, Mealie also supports event-driven integrations via notifiers, rather than polling.

[andrew-codechimp]

The ATOM Echoes are a little too small to be an Alexa replacement, a few feet away and you won't hear it, or it hear you but they are cheap/fun to play around with. I've got some OnjuVoice esphome's setup (rip apart a Google Mini and install a custom pcb from China) which has far better speaker/microphone setup but expensive.

I mainly use note type items so don't think auto labelling will help there unless it has a history it can refer to.

I did look at the event notifiers but you can't setup a custom endpoint in HA to receive them so drew a blank on how we could manage that.

[michael-genson]

rip apart a Google Mini and install a custom pcb from China

I'll have to take a look. Yeah I'm skeptical on the ATOM Echo, but it was pretty cheap so I figured it'd be worth a shot. Supposedly you can install some custom firmware to hook up an external speaker to it, at least.

I mainly use note type items so don't think auto labelling will help

It basically fuzzy-compares against your food store, so if you have a food store set up in Mealie (with associated labels) it'll work for you. e.g. if you have a food "apple" in Mealie with the "Produce" label, then when you add a note item "apple" (or "apples", etc.) it will get auto-labeled with "Produce". It's an alternative to manually specifying the food (which is great when adding from a recipe, but not as great when adding manually or via an integration). You can make it even more accurate by setting up aliases (e.g. have a food "Dr. Pepper" and an alias "Doctor Pepper", which helps with voice assistants getting names wrong).

Plus side: wonderful automatic labeling (which lets you organize your shopping list in order by aisle in the grocery store)
Down side: needs some initial setup (have a decently robust food store with plurals and aliases)

you can't setup a custom endpoint in HA

You should be able to do it with Webhooks, though I have no clue if integrations can manage those: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/trigger/#webhook-trigger

[andrew-codechimp]

Plus side: wonderful automatic labeling (which lets you organize your shopping list in order by aisle in the grocery store) Down side: needs some initial setup (have a decently robust food store with plurals and aliases)
I used to use labels in AnyList but for my big shop now I do it all online so it's less of a need to organise by aisle, they were a lot of effort so I've not looked into those much at the moment. If HA could have auto suggest on the add this could be interesting.

You should be able to do it with Webhooks, though I have no clue if integrations can manage those: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/trigger/#webhook-trigger

@joostlek might be interesting if the core integration could do this, not something I'm familiar with.

[joostlek]

Webhooks from mealie towards HA?

[andrew-codechimp]

Webhooks from mealie towards HA?

That's what @michael-genson is getting at, though looking at docs they are only scheduled.
Notifiers would be more interesting but I know HA's apprise is currently just for UI notifications rather than integration events.
https://docs.mealie.io/documentation/getting-started/features/#integrations

[joostlek]

We can do practically everything with webhooks. In withings we receive trigger for updating with them. We can create event entities that show when something triggers, for example those mealie timer thingies.

[michael-genson]

Yeah notifiers is how I implemented it here to integrate with Alexa. Basically:

• create a notifier that posts to any arbitrary url (in this case it would be the Home Assistant webhook URL)
• read the notifier body and determine which items were created/updated/deleted
• do CRUD in HA

Mealie also supports arbitrary extra data in shopping lists and items, so you can store external ids, etc. But HA supports this too so probably not needed (I needed it for Alexa since they don't store metadata)