[APBeta] Problem transferring notes between plans

[Hilary Jones]

I'm not sure I see why in your example you wouldn't want to have the notes 
about astroid XYZ appear in both the distance and light curve plans.  The 
kind of information I would want to put there is stuff about the astroid --  
maybe its size, magnitude, reputed distance, etc.  If I had measured the 
distance myself, I would probably want to record that as an observation. 
But maybe I would put it in the catalog annotation saying "the reputed 
distance is X but I measured Y", and in this case I don't see any reason why 
I wouldn't _want_ to see this information in the light curve project too, 
assuming I thought it was important enough to put in the catalog in the 
first place.

To my way of thinking, I'm not changing the plan, but rather changing 
catalog annotation.  I would expect all plans to view a given entry in the 
catalog the same way.  If I needed to record some notes that were specific 
to the plan, I would probably use an observation.  Or perhaps AstroPlanner 
could be modified to have two ways of taking notes: some that pertain to the 
object, and some that pertain to the plan.  That's getting rather fancy for 
my tastes; but perhaps it's the best way to satisfy both of our needs.

As for using an option to enable or disable this feature, I see some 
implementation problems.  If we regard the change as a change to the catalog 
itself, then the data only has to be kept in one place.  But if there's an 
option of keeping the information in the catalog and/or the plan, then we 
get into the mess that we had with global observations.  (I realize you 
wouldn't _really_ want to record the annotations in the catalog file itself. 
So when it got down to implementation details, the annotations would go 
somewhere in some sort of "catalog addendum" file.  Logically it would be 
part of the original catalog, but physically it would be in a separate 
file.)

Take care,
Hilary


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "RPEHLM" <robin at lauryssen-mitchell.com>
To: "AstroPlanner Beta Testers" <apbeta at lists.astroplanner.net>
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 10:51 AM
Subject: Re: [APBeta] Problem transferring notes between plans


> Hi folks,
>
> I'm a bit bothered by this.  I don't like the idea of AP changing a plan 
> that I have not specifically asked it to.  Maybe an example would make my 
> concern clearer.  Two plans open, first is for an asteroid light curve 
> project, second is for an asteroid distance measuring project.  Same 
> asteroids could be in both plans.  I definately don't want AP changing the 
> asteroid light curve plan just because I make a change to the asteroid 
> distance project plan!  Could this behaviour be subject to a checkbox in 
> Preferences somewhere?
>
> Or am I misunderstanding something?
>
> Regards
> Robin
>