Generate Excel for flying time

[huguesf]

Under #28

Glider and Tow
As maintenance
I want a csv file
... so that they can use the numbers in other systems (AMS) or manual reports.
... use in Excel.

[Davisonp]

This report is required in both PDF and CSV (excel) formats. PDFs are stored for reference, CSVs are used for data manipulation and stats

[huguesf]

Q. What is a connectedAircraftRecord (FlightRecord property of type FlightRecord)? Is it two plane (towplane and glider) "connected" together? Or Twice the same plane doing a connection (transit) between to legs of the flight?

[huguesf]

Q. In provided Excel example, numbers are treated as String. This result in "warning" in Excel, plus they are left aligned. Do we want them right aligned and treated as Number by Excel? If yes how important is this? Can we wait till later release?

[kirvanp]

That relationship links a glider flight to the corresponding flight for the launch vehicle. That's important so that, for example, if you change the takeoff time of a glider it makes sure the towplane takeoff time is also changed to be the same. The relationship is not always used, for example if a towplane flies by itself.

[huguesf]

In the timesheets report for the sequence column, there is this code:

                var text = recordBeingExamined.flightSequence
                
                if recordBeingExamined.flightSequence == "Transit"
                {
                    text += " \(recordBeingExamined.transitRoute)"
                }
                
                if let connectedRoute = recordBeingExamined.connectedAircraftRecord?.transitRoute,
                    recordBeingExamined.connectedAircraftRecord?.flightSequence == "Transit"
                {
                    text += " \(connectedRoute)"
                }

Which seem to allow two differents transitRoute for the glider and the towplane. How is this possible? Or am I mistaken?

[kirvanp]

Negative. The issue here is that the sequence for a towplane that is towing is always "towing". This is a throwback to paper timesheets where there was only one "sequence" column and hence only one sequence for each flight. I suppose in a digital world we could design something where flights could have multiple sequence tags, but when I started this project I had to stay pretty close to what works on paper. So recording all tows as "towing", whether they are x-country or not, seemed like the best idea since that means that there will be the same number of tows as glider flights. Always. Now unfortunately that leaves the problem of how to figure out if the "towing" flight was also a x-country, which brings us to your code snippet.

So what the code snipped actually does is that if its outputting a glider transit flight or a towplane transit flight without a glider, the first IF statement is triggered. If its outputting a record for a towplane that was doing a transit flight with a glider, the second IF statement is triggered because it checks and sees that there is a connected glider record, that that record is for a x-country, and it then uses the route from the glider record. Therefore, for a joint glider/towplane x-country, only the glider routing is used, for both planes, so the situation where transitRoute is different would not arise.