Data to correct: wrong info displayed

[dsfh2992]

Ok, that's great. What is the source of the "online lookup" going to be? Are you going to maintain some kind of DB server that all VRS instances will query for their data, or will it come from somewhere else? Will we be able to contribute additions to the data?

Thanks,
Dan

[agw]

It's a bit up in the air. The source is whatever can be gleaned from public civil registries, so it will be US / Australian / Swedish etc. civil aviation, and I was going to extend the routes site to allow people to contribute new aircraft and corrections (particularly corrections to the hookups between registry entries and operator / model ICAO codes, and in the case of registries that don't publish operators, the operator names when it's an airline). However just recently the possibility has arisen of using another source of aircraft data to seed the database, which at the very least would increase the number of aircraft that could be looked up.

The data will be coming from one of my servers but I've split up the code in such a way that it should be fairly easy for people to write plugins to fetch data from alternate sources without having to rewrite everything. Whether you'll be able to contribute aircraft to the database - depends If the database is just coming from public registries then yes, however if this other source is being used then I think they would appreciate corrections being made via them. It wouldn't make sense for them to provide seed data and then for me to let people apply updates to it independently of them.

[Me109]

Hi Andrew -

Are you envisioning this as an enhancement to VRS in the sense of making it more self-sufficient? What I mean is, presently I use PBlink3 for a/c detail updates - effectively a cooperative 3rd party application to VRS - whereas VRS natively using an online lookup database would eliminate the need for a 3rd party app if I'm reading this correctly.

[agw]

It depends on what you want to see about the aircraft. I'm only going to be doing a basic details lookup - registration, manufacturer, model, model ICAO, operator, operator ICAO, serial number and year built.

The aim is to try to make life easier for new users and Linux users. At the moment BasicAircraftLookup.sqb kind of helps with getting lookups to new users but it's very UK-centric, and once I start putting US registry aircraft in there it could get enormous, hence the move to an online lookup. Linux users have a problem with keeping BaseStation.sqb up-to-date, as far as I'm aware none of the lookup services have Linux clients which means that either users update manually or, more likely, they use pre-populated BaseStation.sqbs and lose all of their flight records every time they refresh it.

The idea here is to have a caching online lookup that does not depend on the database writer plugin being installed, which will help new users out, but if the database writer is installed and you tick the box to tell it to update BaseStation.sqb with details from the lookups then it will take over the caching side of things and cache to the Aircraft table in your BaseStation.sqb, so you can use that to keep your BaseStation.sqb up-to-date.

That's the plan anyway

[Me109]

Nice plan, sounds great

[dsfh2992]

Just FYI, loading the US registration DB into basestation.sqb increased the file size to 300mb.

[dimbel]

I'm a Linux user and the way I deal with it so far is to do the updates offline (=stopping VRS). The directory where the BaseStation.sqb is located is mounted as an smb share on my Linux box. After VRS is stopped, I update the data either with SBSPopulate and/or PBLink3.
I'm quite OK with this way of working.

A side question related to PBLink3 data: When data for unknowns is updated via PBLink3, i have noticed that some non-ICAO codes are used that VRS doesn't know and hence doesn't display the aircraft icon for it. Currently I use a sql script to modify those values back to official ICAO codes. It could be cool if we have a possibility to map this data centraly in same kind of translation table.
Example:
F2DX -> F2TH
F2EX -> F2TH

[Falcon_viper55]

Hello,

Thanks for great sofware!

Here somes miscodes show military but are civil:

3E94DA
D-KVOK
DIMO
Daimond HK-36TTC Super Dimona
Germany

3E8196
D-KOGS
Germany

Show Civil but are operator with military company on military airbase.

A-4 Skyhawk
Canada

C01267
C0126B
C01271
C01275

Can we miscodes edit by by yourself in future?
it would be much easier for your creators because there are plenty much miscodes.

[Sentry_e3]

You can edit them in local, with LocalAircraft.txt

Andrew tell us when you have finished because there are new ones

[Falcon_viper55]

Thanks that work great guys.