Extracting data - Climate products

[shadrackkibet]

From my experience here at KMD I find this form painful to use. I also discussed this with @mwaurahk . When extracting data for over 30 stations we have to manually type stations identifier on the combo box then select them from a list of many other stations one by one which is a tiresome process. The issue here is to think about how this can be made easy. I thought instead of having a combo box and empty list view which populates when you select Station, we can have a list view containing stations with checkboxes to select stations.

This could save some typing and hence we can select stations quickly. I think this can also be applied to elements. There might be other suggestions to make this an easy process. What about allowing an administrator to define groups of stations? i.e synoptic stations, Agromet stations e.tc. Then when extracting we can just click somewhere to select a group and extract the data. This facility is used frequently so I think making it efficient to use will save someone's time.

[mhabimana]

@shadrackkibet -Thanks,yes,you are right. I suggest the dialog below implemented in the QC be used for product to save time spent in selecting one station and element at a time as you said:

[smachua]

@shadrackkibet and @mhabimana thanks for your suggestions on the methods of selecting stations and elements for climate products. Use of list views as you suggest was the method used in Climsoft Version 3.2. However, some users requested for a change to a way where one can easily view all the selected items put together. The list view had difficulties in viewing the selected items especially when they are scattered across the list. Lot of scrolling was required when viewing the selected items for corrections or checking for omissions. That's is why this approach was adopted in version 4. I will look if a hybrid of the 2 approaches can be implemented or something better. Grouping of stations based on certain categories is something being considered. Those categories will be based on the metadata. So where metadata is not well managed the expected results will not be achieved. More contributions are welcome.