Thursday, October 21, 2010

Date/time range lookups on the map

This isn't, technically, a big feature, but I expect it to make a lot of people happy. I should have done it a couple years ago.


The map's user interface for looking up historical tracking data used to only allow fetching a single UTC calendar day at a time. I've now implemented arbitrary date / time range searches, where you can select up to 14 days of track data at a time. It also allows for more exact time lookups, such as 2010-10-20 05:58:00 to 2010-10-20 06:38:00. Click the calendar icon to open up the new search form.

I've also switched to a tabbed view for the year ranges, and brought back a bit of December 2008 data. 2008 will go away over time, but the tabbed view fits at least 3 years without taking an awful lot of valuable screen estate.

The user interface still needs some tuning. The time ranges are expressed in UTC regardless of your time zone settings. The UI doesn't say that yet. It also fails to mention the 14 day limit (but it will complain with a nice red error message box if needed).

I might raise or lower the 14 day limit, depending on the amount and magnitude of server load peaks it generates. We'll see. I'd like to make it 30, but it might have some adverse effects.

I've also made small changes to the real-time map's update API, making the communication between the JavaScript running in the web browser and the server a bit quicker and smaller, saving some bandwidth. This change made it necessary to take the web service into maintenance mode for a few minutes, forcing all current viewers of the map to load the new JavaScript components of the page.

How do you like it? Feedback in the comments, please!

2 comments:

Steve and Reeny said...

Your site is excellent! Please keep up the good work. I have only just installed APRS recently, and I think it's fantastic.
Steve - VK4VH

j.Alles said...

Thanks, this works quite intuitively - I used it to retrieve the track of the football on the bus to & from the Army/Navy game earlier this month.

callsign 'FBALL'

Thanks again for the continued develpoment.

Jim A. KB3TBX