[APBeta] Problem transferring notes between plans

[Paul Rodman]

On Mar 19, 2009, at 11:42 PM, RPEHLM wrote:

> Thanks for taking the trouble to explain.  Will cogitate futher but  
> that requires massive injections of caffeine at this time of the  
> morning :).  Wonder what would happen if a simple copy of the  
> catalogue was made for different projects (e.g. AsteroidLC.apcat,  
> AsteroidDist.apcat etc.)?  Will attempt to give my AP the screaming  
> ebee jeebies later :)
>
> Robin
>
> Hilary Jones wrote:
>> 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.)
>>

I will be looking into this as soon as I've finished this rather  
complex rewrite of the image database stuff. Actually, the complexity  
is more in getting rid of the large quantities of old spaghetti code  
than in adding the new stuff, which is much faster, more robust, and  
has some nice extra features over the older code. Should also shrink  
the app size a bit too.

Paul R.