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A Few Inquiries from State College

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John Banghoff, modified 5 Years ago.

A Few Inquiries from State College

Youngling Posts: 1 Join Date: 6/12/17 Recent Posts

All,

CTP has been gradually transitioning to use of IRIS and we have encountered a few stumbling blocks along the way. 

1. We have a briefing list that has been managed outside of IRIS. When we upload the briefing list contacts, we would like to assign them to a "Briefing List" contact group in IRIS. This has proved difficult, however, as there doesn't appear to be a way to assign a group of contacts to a contact list during the upload phase. We have found 2 potential workarounds: (1) assigning them all to a unique identifier under categories that we won't use otherwise or (2)Deleting all contacts from the IRIS database, uploading all the briefing list contacts, and then assigning them all to the Briefing List contact group. Is there a better way to do it? Is it possible that this feature be added in version 7?

2. Mass deleting of IRIS contacts proves problematic. As we've been experimenting with our contact list of 4k+ people (mostly spotters), uploading takes some time but is doable, even for large numbers. We have run into some issues with deleting. If you select more than about 50 contacts at a time and delete them, they disappear from IRIS. When you refresh the page, however, you find out that only about 20 or 30 went away. Is there a known limit on the number of contacts that can be deleted at one time. If there is, is there a way to eliminate that limitation?

3. Contact duplication is a very easy mistake to make. Whether uploading from the same list and working through errors that IRIS throws from the input, or simply having contacts on multiple lists (media, briefing list, spotters, etc.), duplication of contacts happens really easily. Is it possible to develop some sort of database checker to update contacts within IRIS so that they will overwrite if they find similarities?

4.  This was brought up before in the IRISchat on NWSChat, but duplicating here for completeness. We have been using the LLL to produce the Regional Weather Summary each evening while teleworking. It works well to send it over to the office for dissemination to the world. Is it possible to limit the IRIS text window to 69 characters?

5. We have had some issues with multiple precip reports from the same source showing up in the Wx Reports/LSRs tab over a given time period. It appears that the program publishes rainfall totals for the same station within minutes of each other that are off by a couple hundredths of an inch. This problem is eradicated by using the Obs Monitor tab, but it does not appear Obs Monitor is able to pull in LSRs. The ability to combine LSR info with the observations in IRIS is a useful tool. As it stands right now, there is a tradeoff between including LSRs in a PNS & having multiple reports to sort through when making a PNS. 

 

Any guidance you can provide would be much appreciated! 

 

Thanks,

 

John Banghoff

NWS State College, PA

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JM
Joseph Moore, modified 5 Years ago.

RE: A Few Inquiries from State College

Youngling Posts: 34 Join Date: 11/1/13 Recent Posts
Hi John,

Fellow IRIS user here, also working to get contacts into IRIS from a Google Sheet we currently use to manage various email lists. A few comments...

1) I, too, wish there was an easy way to assign Groups when mass uploading. IRIS does have pretty robust filtering, though, so you may be able to do queries on legit data to create groups, assuming you include all the metadata for a contact needed for such a query. As an example, for a "media" list, make sure you use the "Media (xx)" category upon upload.) You can even make narrower groups like a "media-eastern CWA" by filtering by Category then by location/county. Again, though, this assumes you make sure you go through the effort of adding an address for every contact - something I'm doing manually for our contacts that we send emails to. A creative work-around if the filtering doesn't work could be to assign groups a "spotter ID" (which is just a free text field) and then query all contacts with that spotter ID.

2) For mass operations, open an IRIS ticket! The IRIS team can do more powerful operations, so if you want a quick mass delete or want them to check a file before uploading, just ask.

3) YES. I wish IRIS had a method to check for duplicate contacts a la when you copy files in Windows and get a "which file do you want to keep?" dialogue, with the option to merge or choose the older or newer version to save. I've asked this question a few ways with regards to spotter management and I think the only way to make sure you don't get duplicates to manage the entire database using a CSV, then once or twice a year ask the IRIS team to delete everything and upload your local version. Manually entering in spotters just seems like it could take upwards of 3-5 minutes per spotters if manually entering via the current "add contact" interface, including the time to first search to see if a contact already exists - crazy.

-Joe


On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 2:42 AM John Banghoff <VLab.Notifications@noaa.gov> wrote:

All,

CTP has been gradually transitioning to use of IRIS and we have encountered a few stumbling blocks along the way. 

1. We have a briefing list that has been managed outside of IRIS. When we upload the briefing list contacts, we would like to assign them to a "Briefing List" contact group in IRIS. This has proved difficult, however, as there doesn't appear to be a way to assign a group of contacts to a contact list during the upload phase. We have found 2 potential workarounds: (1) assigning them all to a unique identifier under categories that we won't use otherwise or (2)Deleting all contacts from the IRIS database, uploading all the briefing list contacts, and then assigning them all to the Briefing List contact group. Is there a better way to do it? Is it possible that this feature be added in version 7?

2. Mass deleting of IRIS contacts proves problematic. As we've been experimenting with our contact list of 4k+ people (mostly spotters), uploading takes some time but is doable, even for large numbers. We have run into some issues with deleting. If you select more than about 50 contacts at a time and delete them, they disappear from IRIS. When you refresh the page, however, you find out that only about 20 or 30 went away. Is there a known limit on the number of contacts that can be deleted at one time. If there is, is there a way to eliminate that limitation?

3. Contact duplication is a very easy mistake to make. Whether uploading from the same list and working through errors that IRIS throws from the input, or simply having contacts on multiple lists (media, briefing list, spotters, etc.), duplication of contacts happens really easily. Is it possible to develop some sort of database checker to update contacts within IRIS so that they will overwrite if they find similarities?

4.  This was brought up before in the IRISchat on NWSChat, but duplicating here for completeness. We have been using the LLL to produce the Regional Weather Summary each evening while teleworking. It works well to send it over to the office for dissemination to the world. Is it possible to limit the IRIS text window to 69 characters?

5. We have had some issues with multiple precip reports from the same source showing up in the Wx Reports/LSRs tab over a given time period. It appears that the program publishes rainfall totals for the same station within minutes of each other that are off by a couple hundredths of an inch. This problem is eradicated by using the Obs Monitor tab, but it does not appear Obs Monitor is able to pull in LSRs. The ability to combine LSR info with the observations in IRIS is a useful tool. As it stands right now, there is a tradeoff between including LSRs in a PNS & having multiple reports to sort through when making a PNS. 

 

Any guidance you can provide would be much appreciated! 

 

Thanks,

 

John Banghoff

NWS State College, PA


--
John Banghoff IRIS Virtual Lab Forum https://vlab.noaa.gov/web/iris/iris-forum/-/message_boards/view_message/10667805 VLab.Notifications@noaa.gov


--
Joseph J. Moore
Warning Coordination Meteorologist
NOAA/National Weather Service Duluth, MN
Office: 218-729-6483 x726 | Cell: 267-481-0341 | Operations: 218-729-0653
MS
Mike Sutton, modified 5 Years ago.

RE: A Few Inquiries from State College

Youngling Posts: 61 Join Date: 6/21/13 Recent Posts

John and Joe,

Thanks for your questions. We will try to answer your questions to the best of our ability.

1) While group information is not currently part of the IRIS contact upload process, Joe's suggestions for filtering could allow you to streamline the process of grouping contacts.  One site recently imported about 700 contacts from a Google Contacts export csv.  The newly imported contacts all appeared with Unknown as their LSR source type.  The site was able to organize all of the contacts with this characteristic, highlight them all and then assign them to a contact group at one time.  As always(and as Joe indicated), if you run into issues and need assistance, open a ticket and one of the team members will get with you to help.

2) If you have a large number of contacts to delete, please open a ticket.  Those on the IRIS team with database access can speed up the process.  The contact database is meant to be the repository for your contacts.  Some sites have thousands of contacts and manually add or delete items as needed.  You can also periodically export  your contacts to a csv file for safekeeping.  

3) Unfortunately there is no duplicate contact checker, and one is not anticipated.  When IRIS V7 is released next year, the processes used for contact management will change, so stay tuned.

4) Please open a ticket on the 69 character formatting issue for the LLL product.

5)  Several revisions have been made to the observation decoder process to address the issue you mentioned, along with others.  We don't have an estimate on when the new version will be moved to the operational version, but we will let you know as soon as that happens.

Thanks,
IRIS Support 
Mike Sutton (ITO GRR) 
Scott Reiter (ITO DDC)