Database Update September 2015

I’ve just uploaded a database update that fixes a number of issues.

  • All JA is available as a grouping so you can group all JA associations together in honour rolls.

  • Time/date bug fixed. If you entered a date but separated the numbers with a : instead of a / then the input parser treated that as a time. This could result in QSOs you entered becoming invisible.

  • summitslist.csv has better handling of summit names which contained quotes or commas. Now there should be no summits in the output named with double double-quotes. i.e. ““Divide, The””

  • internal changes regarding file export have been made to enable production of compressed files. Only .gzip format is supported not .zip at present. This is not yet enabled.

  • Wording on Activator/Chaser/Sotacomplete/SwlLog/S2SLog honour rolls has been changed from “Save to file” to “Download complete log” to make the purpose more obvious.

  • Wording on the “submit chaser/S2S/SWL” log page has been changed to emphasise the first summit entered is the one you chased.

  • Activator log display now has the option to show who has logged chases of you activation. It shows who has logged a QSO with your callsign on the date in question and who has logged the summit on the date in question. There’s no way to alert a chaser they have logged the QSO incorrectly yet. The show awards button has been removed as there is a show awards menu option

  • 12m Challenge results have been dropped from the bottom of the My Awards page. There is a 12m result page now.

  • The demo option showing how the 6m/10m Challenge page would work has been removed as we have data in the database now.

  • The dates of the 2nd section of the 6m/10m Challenge have been updated. There’s an item in the news regarding this. The change is minor, the period starts 1 day earlier on 14th November 2015 and finishes 1 day earlier.

  • Keyboard navigation has been improved. It should be possible to move between fields using the TAB key and the default fields have been set on many pages. I admit I must be doing something wrong in the code because this does not always work. It works better now than before but it’s not perfect.

As usual you can report things I’ve broken by email to me or you can post them in this thread.

1 Like

-this bodes well for the SMP, since it can now deal with gzip files.

Ah good stuff, I’ll turn on gzipping and let you know when that’s working.

That threw me this afternoon putting in the many stations worked today.
Was the freq band list suddenly increased LOL

good work

Karl

Something not quite right here.
On 08/09/15 I activated Hardown Hill and Lewesdon Hill.

Looking at my activator log for Hardown Hill I see the 12 QSOs.
When I press the “Show who chased me” button, I see only 4 of them but also see a lot of QSO’s made by M0LEP from that summit and also several (but not all) of the QSOs I made from Lewesdon Hill.
It looks like the code is confused when two activators swap hills at lunchtime.

Colin

No confusion in the code Colin, just in you in what it is supposed to be showing you.

Just read the descriptions above the tables and all should become clear.

Andy,

excellent news and in particular the change to the start date for the second period of the 6m/10m challenge. In VK that means it includes the VK VHF/UHF Field day, which will see a number of field stations operating on 6m.

73
Andrew vk1da

Of course this is a good thing. I used to have to process those specially for import into MS Access.

However the downloaded file still isn’t quite valid CSV for direct import into some utilities, because of that pesky extra line on the front:

SOTA Summits List (Date=28/09/2015)

A CSV file should really have the field names on the first line, followed by data rows. Obviously I can remove this line before import as I’ve been doing for ages, but now this is the only change I have to make.

Andy, Just a suggestion as I can see how a few folk might get confused with this bit, after selecting Show who chased me button you get the list. Very nice feature! But I think the wording could be a bit better, The following QSOs were logged for 2M0NCM/P on 25/Jul/2015: - I think the word Chaser before QSOs would make it a bit clearer.

Just my tuppence worth. :wink:

Neil

Andy,
While you are looking at extracting data from the database would it be convenient to extend the lists in the Statistics page. I have a huge list of regions worked but only 10 each of top chasers, activators and summits chased or activated.
Perhaps these could be extended to 50 or when the lowest one reaches a limit value. The other lists presumably extend indefinitely.
I have not yet tried the new check lists but look forward to doing so next time I look critically at my chaser asterisks :blush:
73,
Rod.

Doesn’t seem unreasonable Rod.

Let’s see the query starts “select top 10 ‘’ as Position, COUNT (a.OtherCallsign) as count,” so all that needs to change is “top 10” should be “top 50” and it’s done. Displaying to a limit is a little harder, not much. It does require doing something that now maybe not so wise.

Most of the database is designed as dynamic. i.e. It doesn’t keep your score to hand but works it on the fly. The DB records which summits you activated and what each activation scored. Then it adds them up when it needs to display your total. No great problem. However, honour rolls are done the same but looped. So it’s a case of finding everyone in a certain association and for every person finding every activation and summing the score. It works a dream on a private or local DB engine. But it’s not so good for cloud based DB engines. This is an issue because the DB is getting to the point we need to come up with a solution that will scale and what we have doesn’t do that well. Scaling means cloud based and so some internals of the code need to be changed.

I don’t mind making a limit bigger if it’s fixed, dynamic is maybe OK. All my experience with this kind of programming is with private&shared solutions and running the DB in a cloud setup over the weekend was “eye opening”.

Next time I’m updating, I’ll raise the limit to 25 and see how that works.

Yes, that is easy and will help.

Thank you,
73,
Rod

The show who chased me is a handy thing. Thanks for your efforts in setting this up.

73’s Nick

The new “Show who chased me” feature is very interesting.
After checking some (3 or 4) of my last activations, I’ve realised that there are a significant number of errors:

  • several callsign without /P,
  • several callsign with /1 in error, instead of the correct /P
  • one wrong summit reference
    I won’t contact these chasers to warn them about their errors but I’ll check for possible errors made by me on those chases I’ve introduced into the database which are not showing the confirmation asterisc of a perfect match between chaser and activator logs.
    Thanks for this nice tool, Andy.
    73 de Guru

It’s certainly handy for finding typos. (Note to self: don’t go typing in logs at oh-dark-stupid-hour before getting some sleep unless you want significant differences between your paper and electronic logs… :confused: )