Welcome to the shaunsoft blog !
The purpose of the blog is to allow people to keep up to date with the latest news from shaunsoft, preview the latest developments for CTX and related software, and of course join in the general discussions. 
A quick note about the voting…..whilst you can vote on any post in the blog, its real purpose is to gain opinion on new features and ideas for the software. To vote simply click on the number of stars you would like to give the article\feature etc.
Before I get stuck into this post I should apologise for the huge gap in between this and the last post, basically this is because I’ve been incredibly busy with the new development work. I know some avid readers have been complaining about the lack of posts ! …OK one person mentioned it in passing
So what have I been up to……well pretty much the same as always coding away on the new version of CTX…..as mentioned in the last post I’ve been working way on the request frequency stuff and the update tool and some very exciting GIS stuff.
Request Frequency….nightmare
We did a test upgrade last week at a site that carries over 20,000 people a month…nearly all of whom are regular …the perfect site to test the performance of the new ‘model’. Well to cut a long story short it failed ! Well that’s not quite true…the update tool couldn’t cope with the shear number of completed journeys, in its defence there were a few million of them ! …..but the main killer was the performance of the new requests…the site do a large number of regular requests, mostly for 10 years or more and pretty much every day of the week……..when saving one of these requests it took around 20 seconds to save (this is on a good if not busy network)…..compared to under a second for a one off or ‘old style’ request…so clearly this isn’t good enough….so it was back to the drawing board with that one !
Anyway after a few days out and about visiting people I finally got back to my desk on Wednesday to tackle this problem…..and finally cracked it about 2 hours ago !……I’ve got it down from 20 to under 5 seconds for 2 journeys going every single day for 50 years ! …so for the majority of you…you won’t notice the difference between the old way and the new …well in performance terms……..as I type this..I have the new frequency generator running generating 20 frequency lists that go back to 2007, with lots of odd days here and there that don’t go…and the end of the list is in 2012…there are roughly 5,000 journeys using these lists…none of which have ever been generated…its been going for about 45 mins so far…I have no idea how many ‘journeys’ its actually going to generate..but it will be a lot !…If this works out OK then I will apply the same technique to the update tool……oh ! its just finished…47 minutes….to generate 492,857 journeys !…..if there hadn’t been so many ‘holidays’ in the lists it would have done it in half the time……so its a success….finally…. so I think that issue has now been resolved…just need to modify the update tool and we are ready to go !……We will be writing an ‘Understanding Frequency in CTX’ article to help people get the most out of the new CTX.
Spotlight 2
Finished the various report types in Spotlight, just have the new ctXtra reports to add…I’m incredibly pleased with the new Spotlight..its becoming the tool I always dreamt it would be…just one last push on these new style reports and we are there……
GIS (Mapping stuff)
Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of work on the new GIS tools in CTX and its very exciting indeed !…..those of you who don’t have access to GIS start looking to finding access to maps now !
The main area I’ve been working on (and can’t wait to get back to it) are the automatic routing features……I’m not going into them now…..but if you want to find out more then let us know and we can arrange a demo etc……Watch this space !
I’ll try and be a bit more regular with the blog, I promise…….
Back at my desk on a gloriously sunny Monday morning, in true Cumbrian style it pours down all weekend and manages to find some sunshine on Monday morning! A morning of Windows update nightmares…it’s amazing how Vista manages to find so many updates when you’re all fired up and ready to get stuck into some good work! So whilst my PC is busy doing whatever it feels like I thought that I would scribble a few lines about what I’ve been up to development wise this last week and what’s planned for the next.
I pretty much spent all last week working on ‘Frequency’ for the next update of CTX, when we…no, I should confess .. When I came up with the new ‘request model’ I really didn’t think through the full implications for regular journeys and Frequency, in particular ‘List Based’ frequency, there isn’t space here to go into detail suffice to say that the ‘new Frequency List’ management was massively complicated to implement as it no longer simply updates the lists but EVERY journey that uses the list and of course we have to handle changes to lists, new lists and so forth……It was horrible to do, however I’m very pleased with the results…..on the downside the work has highlighted a number of issues that should have been considered further in the new ‘Request Window’….particularly with modification to existing requests, my week is going to spent checking and double checking everything that can be done with regular requests and make sure that the changes are handled properly and consistently. Some of you will be particularly pleased to read that as part of this I have modified the ‘every number of days’ frequency type to support multiple days, which means you can in one request say that a journey goes for every ‘number of days’ e.g. 14, every Monday and Friday, without having to uses list based frequency.
My main task for this week is getting the tool written to convert existing CTX databases to support the new model, which for most people will be a quick almost instant process, however as is always the case there a some installations that will be complicated mainly because of the sheer number of requests they use CTX to manage, I’m talking about people who use CTX to manage over 30,000 trips a month (some are more than this figure daily!), the main issue with these projects is simply the amount of time it will take to process each trip as typically these requests are many years long and occur every day and unfortunately there is no escape from the fact that the update tool will have to inspect and update every journey for every day in the life of each request! That is going to be a long time staring at egg timers and very slowly moving progress bars. I am trying however to make it as efficient as possible and enable control over how the update is done…enabling it to be done in manageable chunks.
As a diversion from this I’ll also be putting a bit of time into Spotlight 2, which is now well underway, we have lofty ambitions for Spotlight 2. I’ve already completed stage one of the process and included the ‘Reporting Services’ based reports (.ctr reports) and the new ‘Quick Reports’ not only into Spotlight but thorough out CTX. This week I intend to finish the new ctxWrite , which has now also merged into Spotlight. I think people will love the new ‘ctxWrite editor’, it gives you so much control over your documents. Once this is finished I just have to add the new ‘ctXtra’ reports to Spotlight and the rest of CTX !….Ahh!, it’s just crossed my mind you probably have no idea what the ‘Quick Reports’ and ctXtra reports are!…..Oh well , I’ll have to leave that one to another blog entry as Vista seems to have finished its never ending cycle of reboots and I’d better get stuck into the update tool !
I’m working from home this week, collie sitting ! Which is great as I’m wrestling with some difficult problems on the new release of CTX, its helpful to be away from the phones !! The downside is that I have to take regular breaks to entertain Finney (the collie), usually by wandering the fields. On the positive side it gives me a chance to think things through.
The main area I’m working on at the moment is the new contract processing stuff, which is taxing my brain to say the least ! However its nearly done, with Finneys help ! There is also a raft of new features, including a whole new charging structure, the ability to add charges and discounts not only to the contract invoice but to individual journeys and individual runs on the contract. Along with this is a much more efficient interface that runs outside the main CTX application, enabling you to quickly flip back into CTX when you need to do something else.
I’m hoping to get it finished, well at least to testing stage before the weekend as of course its the start of the new footy season on Saturday when the mighty Preston North End begin their glorious march to the top of the league and the premiership !…….
Still working merrily on the new request stuff for the next update. I’ve just added what I think is a great new feature. Request history, which is available from anywhere you can access a Request. Simply put, the request history window provides a list of all the ‘occurances’ of a request in a given time frame. Not only this but you can make certain modifications to the occurrences, such as allocate them to a different run as well as cancel and un-cancel them.
View occurences of a request and make modifications
This will not only be available from the requests and runs but from within the service users record…via the new ‘Lists’ tab…to be discussed later ! (such a tease Shaun)…… the eagle eyes amongst you will notice that the Run DRT main at the top of the picture is shown twice ! I’m sure from the visible headings you will work out why……….
Another update on the new developments with the next release of CTX, which has now been given the imaginative title of CTX 1.5.
I have been working on the issue of significant changes to ‘Regular Requests’. CTX will now automatically generate a new regular request when you make a change that will affect previous occurrences of the request such as changing the destination. This will only happen if the request start date has been passed. The original request will end on a specified date and the new request will take effect from that date. This saves CTX users from having to ‘recycle the request’ as they currently should be doing, but often don’t as its easier not to !.
Regenerate Request
However, if you change the times, prices, seating or frequency of the regular a new request isn’t required as this information is stored separately for each occurrence of the request, unless of course you want to…then you can use the recycle button to generate a new request yourself.