Adding thing to a thing group

[mlupur]

Hello,
I am using C++ v2 SDK, and I am doing 'Provisioning by trusted user' to register a thing on AWS. This flow works fine, but now I am wondering how to add registered thing to a group?
I was thinking that device, after it finishes provisioning, can add itself to the group, but I can't seem find a proper method to do that.
Can you help me with it, and is this a proper flow? Or device should not add itself to the group?

Thanks!

[TwistedTwigleg]

Hi mlupur,

Are you using Fleet Provisioning to register your IoT Thing? If so, you can add a ThingGroup to the resources section of the template and then that should make the new IoT Thing be registered as part of that group. The ThingGroup property is described here in the Fleet Provisioning documentation.

There does not appear to be a way to do it after creating the IoT Thing after running RegisterThing as part of the Fleet Provisioning workflow that I could see. I would suggest modifying your Fleet Provisioning template so that it will add the Thing to the required ThingGroup(s) when it is created.

[mlupur]

Hi TwistedTwigleg,

Thank you for your answer. I updated the template, and now a thing is automatically added to the group.
But can you tell me is that a good strategy if we want to add things to different groups? So in that case we would need to have multiple templates (as many as groups), and during provisioning correct template should be used in order to put thing into a certain group?

[TwistedTwigleg]

Hi mlupur,

Great! I'm glad to hear that it worked! If you want to add things to different groups, I believe you can use parameters to make it configurable so you can define which things go into which groups. I have not experimented with it myself, but I think you can use it to have it where you can change the group (or groups if you have multiple) that IoT Things go to using the parameters you pass with the fleet provisioning.

For example, if your fleet provisioning template has the following for the thing groups:

"ThingGroups" : ["all_things", {"Ref" : "Location"}, {"Ref" : "Color"}]

Then you can pass the parameters in JSON to change which groups it is assigned to. For example:

./fleet-provisioning --endpoint <endpoint> --ca_file <path to root CA>
--cert <path to the certificate> --key <path to the private key>
--template_name <template name> --template_parameters {\"Location\":\"Seattle\", \"Color\":\"Red\"}

You could also use multiple templates if you would prefer. I think either solution would work, though I would try the parameter-based solution if you can, simply because it will lead to less templates to maintain and adjust as your application/project evolves.

[mlupur]

This works, I wasn't aware that it can be parameterized like this, thanks for the help!

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