dive site handling

[Doug Junkins]

Sorry for the delay responding — I’m still on vacation and have been trying to avoid the computer as much as possible during the day. Thanks for restarting this discussion and including me on it. I wanted to provide a little context for the other list members for why I am asking about dive site handling and, more importantly to me, the ability to share dive sites between Subsurface users.

I am a relatively new diver and Subsurface user. I’ve been certified for 6 months and just passed my 20th dive while here in Hawaii on vacation. I’m lucky that my wife and two daughters have also been certified recently and we are diving as a family, both on vacation and at home in Seattle. We are all using Subsurface to log our dives and, of course, I am the default “IT guy” for the family so I hear about every pain they have with software.

At this point in our diving “career”, almost every dive is at a new site to us. What I’ve found is that, usually we are so focused before a dive on making sure our equipment is ready, listening to a dive briefing, etc. that we don’t think to mark our location with the phone app before storing our valuables away. This means that after a dive, all of us need to create a dive site in Subsurface from scratch with GPS coordinates pulled from the map or manually copied between each other. I’m also diligently taking notes about dives sites so when we do return to them, we can refresh ourselves on where we entered, what conditions to be aware of, etc. I’d like to be able to share those with my family as well.

My initial thought before I even mentioned anything to Dirk was that it would be nice to have a “choose dive site” button next to the “edit dive site” button that exists today on the main page defined in “desktop-widgets/tab-widget/maintab.ui” (similar to the idea Henrik presented in 2016). In my mind, the “choose dive site” would be an alternative to the existing method of selecting a dive site through auto-completion drop down and would not replace the existing functionality. The “choose dive site” would query an online data base of dive sites with some geographical filters to scope the choices. I also envisioned a social network aspect to the online database where you can have a network of connections to other divers and can scope the query of the online site data to either your own dive sites (which, to be honest, is redundant to the existing functionality in the app), sites of your connections, or “public” sites. The management of these connections and privacy settings could be done through a web interface instead of through the Subsurface app to limit the changes necessary in the app. The other requirement would be to be able to publish your dive site information from the app to the online database. Once you push your dive site information to the database, you would be able to set the privacy to private, connections or public.

I’ve looked back through the archives from April 2016 that Dirk linked to, as well as the thread from September 2018 about GPS and dive site management that arose from the Garmin import issues. Obviously there is a lot of history there that I would miss as a new user. It seems that the level of abstraction between dive data and dive site information has been contentious in the past. I also understand that there are would be a lot of privacy concerns about sharing dive site information, or more importantly, dive data.

After reading some of the history in the archive, I realize that my idea above does not address several issues:

1) After you edit the information for a dive site, does that change apply to all dives in the past that share the same site?
2) After you edit the information for a dive site, does the change get updated in the online database automatically, or do you have to republish it? If it is republished, are people that have used that site themselves notified of the change?
3) Since the dive site unique identifier is derived from the site name and the time that the site record was created, should the uuid be stored in the online database and be consistent for everyone that has selected that site from the database, or does each subsurface user have a new uuid created locally when they first use the site? Or can we add a field to the local record that references a global uuid for the site in the database?

I’m sure there are many more issues that I am not aware of.

Whatever the direction, I am willing to help develop some of these capabilities in Subsurface. I don’t have experience developing in Qt, but I am willing to learn. Being a network geek, most of my experience is in Python and Perl (obviously I’m dating myself), so I am especially keen to help on the web service side to do some rapid prototyping.

Cheers,

-Doug

> On Feb 23, 2019, at 7:32 AM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 22, 2019, at 8:58 PM, Chirana Gheorghita Eugeniu Theodor <office at adaptcom.ro <mailto:office at adaptcom.ro>> wrote:
>> 
>> On the proposed templates for the dive location I see no country field and now I find it very usefull so I think It should be kept. I am also very interested in this subject especially in the part of gps data collecting since I find it very usefull when we scan for new wreck sites.
> 
> I believe Henrik's proposal pre-dated us adding the country field. I see no reason to remove the country field.
> And of course this should all continue to be hooked up with our reverse geo lookup (which I tend to use to populate that country field...)
> 
> /D
> 

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