Creating Routes

[Unknown98]

Terrific stuff unk!

I was thinking perhaps instead of a mileage limit (hard to calculate) we could impose a time restriction, say 24 hours for instance where the aircraft may be assigned to routes, after which you need to restart the same route or create a new one?

Also will it be possible to store routes in order to reuse them and perhaps tweak the times rather than constantly create new ones?

Yeah. So I was thinking the 24 hour limit as well, because the time that the aircraft is in the air is really the only thing we care about, mileage or # of stops can differ widely depending on aircraft.

My idea is to store the routes in the database and then on the "Routes" page, you would have a listing of each route, what aircraft it is assigned to, and so on. You would click "Start Route" and then it would insert all the flights into the database for the day. Once all those flights have been flown, the "Start Route" button would appear again and you would just have to click it again to start another route. I also want to create a way to swap out routes, so you could create 2-3 routes for one aircraft and then just switch between them. Editing of routes should also be possible so you don't have to create a new one if you want to change something, but I haven't thought much about the layout of that page or how exactly it would work. If you just need to change the times it should certainly be possible to edit the route, but if you want to add/delete stops that might be where you would just need to create a new one. I'm not completely sure yet.

Why not just put in a maximum of...I don't know, 16 stops, and then have people select where they want each one and leave all the unneeded ones blank? That way, you wouldn't have to preselect the number of stops, and it would facilitate the ability to amend routes after they have been created...

Well that has the potential to get quite messy on the backend... checking which boxes are empty, determining which stop is the last stop, what if the user skips a box, and so on and so forth... you end up with so many if/else, this/that checks and balances it can get complicated fairly quickly. It's better code-wise if I have the user select up-front how many stops. That was one of the issues I was running into last time I tried to do routes and I had to calculate how many stops the user had, without actually knowing how many they had, and trying to decipher it all.