Feature: Tags for Locationless Analyser

[Partic]

Feature Enhancement Request:
Tags to allow Locationless Analyzerto read GCA Locationless Caches

After earlier in the year emailing Thot to get him to add in the very handy GSAK command line functionality, I've correspondend with him again this week to see what would need to be done to manage the new format GCA locationless caches.

After taking a look, the main issue he indicated was that the logs all currently appear on the one page. GC.com logs can be individually referenced by URLs.

Rather than needing to go to the extent of creating new url fragments for GCA logs, Thot indicated that 'fragment identifiers' could be put into the cache page using named anchors.

So if for a Locationless GCA cache page the following were included before each log, he could have it identified in Locationless Analyzer, and then

<a name="LogNumber1">
<a name="LogNumber2">
<a name="LogNumber3">
...
<a name="LogNumberXXXX">

From there, he could link the listing in Locationless Anaylzer to the anchor, so when you click on the link in the program, it would bring up the page and jump to the log using

http://www.geocaching.com.au/cache/GAXXXX#LogNumberXXXX

Although Australian Locationless caches aren't moving along too quickly at the moment, I hope they'll increase in popularity over time, and this feature would be handy to those keen to pursue them.

[Partic]

Forgot to add that Thot indicated too that this would be the first change that would need to be considered. From there he could test it and then see whether it would work or whether some other changes might need to be made.

[riblit]

There may be another way to attack this. Thot's program has to work around GC.com's reluctance to part with the data in any reasonable form. GCA on the other hand is happy to make data available, as seen by the recent statpack release.<p>
Thot is scraping the GC.com logs to get the latitude and longitude. How about giving him a link on the locationless page that will allow his program. or anybody else, to download a list of the locations logged? There is a GPX file link on the cache page to download a GPX file of the cache and all logs, however the coords are missing from the logs in that file. I would say this is an oversight and could be added.<p>
How about asking Thot if he could modify his program to parse a GPX file and extract the location data from it, meanwhile I'll ask i! about adding the find location.

[ideology]

we had a quick look the softwares homepage. it seems to do three things: (a) screen-scrape, (b) do some analysis/display and (c) hotlink back to the listing site

(a) screen-scraping: as riblit says we think that it would be preferable to use gpx files because they are designed to allow easy transfer of data (as opposed to horrible screen-scraping which breaks every time the page is redesigned). as we said in the other thread, we are happy to add the logged coordinates to the gpx file. they aren't in there now simply because we didn't think of it when we were writing the code!

(b) the analysis and display is all within the software, so that's fine

(c) links back to site: yes, we can add the anchors as you request. if you look in the gpx file for each cache you'll see that we have a unique identifier there, so we'll use that one as an anchor for each log.

does that suit your needs?

[riblit]

I had a quick look at the groundspeak gpx file for locationless caches. Each log has:
<groundspeak:log_wpt lat="48.710183" lon="-116.414" />
</groundspeak:log>

gca gpx files are missing this log_wpt element.
i! 'll send you a sample locationless gpx so you can check the format.

[Partic]

Thanks i! and Riblit. I've emailed Thot to get him to jump into the forums, so you can get more feedback from him directly.

[Mind Socket]

GPX is certainly the way Thot should be going about this.

As for <groundspeak:log_wpt lat="48.710183" lon="-116.414" /> , note that this is a proprietary extension to GPX ... this is bad.

i! might have made some open extensions to the GPX already that everyone can use?

- Rog

[riblit]

GPX is certainly the way Thot should be going about this.

As for <groundspeak:log_wpt lat="48.710183" lon="-116.414" /> , note that this is a proprietary extension to GPX ... this is bad.

i! might have made some open extensions to the GPX already that everyone can use?

- Rog

I think the appropiate extension has been crafted.<br />
I did leave the proprietary bit off my comment

[Thot]

Hello all,

Regarding your suggestion that I download a .gpx file and use that -- the problem is the program now downloads a web page directly and not a file. The program has to be redesigned to download a file, and load it.

I have never written anything that has to download a file, so that approach requires research and learning. Also, it requires parsing the file instead of the web page. I've done that several times but this program would have to be reworked to do it. What Patrick and I discussed was adapting the existing program.

It seems like the easiest way for both of us is to just add the log number identifiers and let me do it the way it works now. I may not be the cleanest way but it requires the least work, since either way you must add the lognumbers.

If you feel strongly about the gpx approach, if you set it up so I can capture a web page containing the gpx file data (instead of downloading the file) I think that would be easy enough to adapt. It would be good if you add the log number fragment identifiers to the .gpx file so I don't have potential error caused by counting. If you don't add the lognumbers then the gpx file must be in the same order as the logs appear on the webpage because I'll be counting them to determine their number.

edited to fix line breaks - the easiest way is to check the 'Disable HTML in this post' checkbox.

[Partic]

Reading along then...

<UL><LI>Accessing the GPX as a URL would be the better way to pass the file to the Locationless Analyzer Program (which can be done now) rather than screen scraping the HTML version of the cache page.</LI>
<LI>The GPX file is just a different kind of XML file and can be read like a HTML file is via URL.</LI>
<LI>Log numbers (fragment identifiers) need to be added to the GPX & HTML to seperate the logs.</LI>
<LI>Coordinates for each location need to be added to the GPX to allow them to be analysed and compared.</LI></UL>

Anything I've missed?

[Thot]

Anything I've missed?

Sounds right to me.

I'd missed a couple of things. One was that your gpx file is setup for each cache. Another is that the gpx file downloads the same as an HTML page, which means no changes should be necessary for me to fetch the gpx file.

Edited to add:

You didn't mention adding the lognumber fragment identifiers to the cache page logs. Did you assume that was already settled?.

[Thot]

It would seem like you folks would want some way to link directly to individual logs. Consider making these points visible/available to users so they can use links directly to specific logs.

And with them in the gpx files if somebody later develops software specific for your site they have these links available.

[Partic]

Edited my post above to include adding Fragment Identifiers to the HTML as well as the GPX.

[ideology]

there's one extra thing which is that we need to modify the .xsd file which describes the gpx file. then we need to test the file to make sure it validates with an xml parser. then it's pretty much right! we should be able to do this fairly soon

[Thot]

we should be able to do this fairly soon

Please post a note here or email me when the mods are active.