shaunsoft

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…….