I was in the outdoors this week with 2 SOTA activations which are both in the same POTA area. I usually export all log files at the end of the activation to my NAS at home. Doing so with the logfiles of the 2nd SOTA activation unfortunately overwrites the 1st file for the POTA area with the data of the 2nd file instead of saving both files separately to the NAS. There is no error message or warning for this conflict.
This problem is caused since Polo creates the same file name for the POTA file for both activations – it is the same POTA area. I suggest therefore to enhance the filenames by e.g. a timestamp or something convenient to prevent such an override in a 3rd party system. Or is there already a standard way to avoid this problem?
However, I suggest to the team to discuss if the filename should not be enhanced by default to make it unique. One has to discover first that the next instance of the same POTA area overwrites the former one without any message. In dubio pro reo!
There’s no simple solution. If we add anything to the filenames, people will protest! trust me when I say that some people are very picky with what these filenames should be, and some programs even require very specific formats. Just adding a timestamp would raise protests.
And because on mobile operating systems, apps like PoLo have no direct access to the file system, we cannot inspect the directory to see if there is already a file with the same name.
A possible solution would be for PoLo to see if there is another operation at the same park in the same day, and use a name variation in that case. But because of how the export functionality is structured in the code, this is not trivial.
I’ve customized the “POTA Activation (ADIF)” export type and it looks fine when applying it on the files of the mentioned multiple activation of the same POTA area. I appended the {{first8 op.uuid}} version at the end of the file name to keep it short. Thanks for offering this customizing possibility despite it can be complicated. I don’t think that you should investigate here more for me.
What is this 8 digit code derived from? Is it a time stamp, and is it always unique?
Vy 73, Markus
PS: Thanks for your remark regarding picky people, hi. I don’t know such people, but I know that they exist and bother others with their immobility regarding file name composition.
Generally, a GUID or UUID is generated from a seed being a semi unique device identifier, plus a timestamp component.
They are regarded as unique within limits which are very high.
Depending on implementation the most unique part can be at the start or at the end of the string which plays into how it can be indexed. Generally speaking they are not “human readable”.
Bottom line, they would be considered unique enough for you never to experience a collision. But there are no guarantees in life … correct?
Such is fine for me, and I was asking back only because “first8” does not use the full UUID. As long as this left portion contains the uniqueness, I am happy.
One way or another I suppose that “first8” makes the POTA file name unique enough for our purpose, hi.