Capabilities

Catalog > Capabilities (/capabilities, with capability:read, covered by every viewer’s *:read floor) is the directory of capabilities: the flat vocabulary of what a component can do, on the same flat-registry pattern as Types and Tags. A capability is a plain name of a function (a microphone, a display, a camera), not a device and not a measurement. Each row shows the id, the display name, and its origin (official, seed-owned, or custom).

A capability is the hinge between two halves of the estate model. On one side, a product declares the capabilities its instances provide, and a component adds to or suppresses that set with its own. On the other, a system role requires a set of them, and a component may fill the role only if it provides every one. Naming a capability once is what makes those two sides line up.

• New capability (with capability:create, an admin permission) opens a create drawer: name its id (a short identifier, unique tenant-wide, e.g. microphone) and give it a display name.
• Pick a row to open its detail blade. The footer Edit pencil (with capability:update) edits the display name; the id is fixed. Delete (with capability:delete) removes the row, behind a confirm.
• An official (seed-owned) row is always read-only: no Edit, no Delete, and the blade marks it “Seed-owned, read-only.” Omniglass ships a starter set of official capabilities (Microphone, Speaker, Display, Flat Panel Display, Camera, Codec, Touch Panel), upserted idempotently at boot so the shared set cannot drift install to install; add a custom capability for anything else.
• Delete carries no in-use guard, and it reaches further than it used to. Every link to a capability is on delete cascade, so deleting one drops it from every product’s set, from every component’s own declarations, and from every role that requires it. A role that loses its last requirement admits any component. Removing a custom row is unconditional (still refused for an official row, 422); the 409 delete-refused-while-referenced rule the Types registry enforces lives instead on component.product_id (a product with components cannot be deleted).

The same operations are omniglass capability list/get/create/update/delete from the CLI (see the CLI reference).

What a component actually provides

A product is the default answer to “what can this component do”, not the whole answer. Real estates diverge from the catalog: a unit has a mic pod nobody modeled, a room bar’s camera is dead and the room should stop being offered as a camera, a component has no product at all because it is a one-off. So a component carries its own capability facts, layered over its product’s.

A component’s detail carries a Capabilities panel showing the resolved set, which is:

the product’s capabilities, plus the ones this component adds, minus the ones this component suppresses.

• Add a capability the product does not claim, and the component provides it from then on. This is also the only way a productless component provides anything, and it is why a component without a product is still fully staffable.
• Suppress a capability the product does claim, and the component stops providing it. Use this for a removed or dead function, not for a temporary fault: suppression is a statement about what the unit is, and it will stop the component from filling any role that needs it.
• Clear a fact to fall back to the product. Clearing is not the same as suppressing: cleared means “whatever the product says”, suppressed means “not this one”.
• Both writes are the component’s own (component:update), because a component’s capabilities are its own data. A component outside your scope is not found, not forbidden.

The resolved set is what the role assignment guard checks, so this panel is where you go when an assignment was refused for a capability you know the device has: declare it here, then assign.

From the CLI: omniglass component capability list <name>, omniglass component capability update <name> <capability> --present true|false, and omniglass component capability delete <name> <capability>.