e-survey Forum

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Tony Nikkel
Nikkel Surveying Ltd
9/10/2006

Below is a copy of a suggestion I have asked Hudson moody to raise with LINZ as NZIS stakeholder representative. I am interested in any comments and/or feedback on the feasability of this idea?

I have had a very rewarding conversation with Dave Kelly of Onstream Trapeze. The upshot of that is that yes it is very feasible to do plan generation offline via the XML file that LoL writes after going from "define diagrams" to "layout sheets". The process of laying out the sheets can be done offline as the Trapeze product written for IBM does just that.

After the amendments are made to the layout sheets (essentially recording the relative position of all the entities and whether we hide them or not), Trapeze writes another XML file that goes back into LoL at the "Save" and "Complete Stage" to produce the final digital plans.

Trapeze are more than interested in writing a third party plan generation tool that will work off-line on our own PC's, provided we can get support for this from most surveyors using LoL and LINZ approves the process. If Trapeze wrote a third party product they would be happy to listen to what improvements surveyors would like in the plan generation tools.

My suggestion for a modified LoL process is therefore as follows:

1. We create a survey and import/build up the topology as we do now.
2. We define the diagrams in LoL as we do now.
3. We export the plan layout sheets XML file to our PC (You can see this file being written when you first activate the "Layout Sheets" menu) and complete plan layout sheets off-line in a third party Trapeze product.
4. We import the completed plans back into LoL via the Trapeze edited XML File.
5. We then complete the attachments, final QA and submit our survey.

Steps 3-5 would require a modification in LoL to allow this data to be imported and exported, however the file can we handled in such a way that the data can only be manipulated in off-line plan generation the same as it is now.

The advantages of this approach are that most of the problems with ISP slowness and/or interruptions occur in Plan Generation. The jerkiness of the system is most pronounced in plan layout sheets when one is moving entities around.

I would suggest that this will halve the amount of time we currently need to spend on line and it will certainly reduce the amount of frustration currently experienced when trying to generate plans on-line. The advantage to LINZ and other users is that there will be less demand on the LoL system, there will be less people on line for shorter durations, which will speed up performance in its own right.

What do you think? Is this feasable?

Matt Suddaby
C Hughes and Associates
11/10/2006

Hey Tony, I reckon that's a great idea. The way you explain it, it seems so simple. I'm sure that any third party software that can avoid the tediously slow, jerky, nature of plan generation, especially for big surveys, would sell like hot cakes. I wonder what LINZ will make of the idea - at least it would take a lot of pressure off their servers. I'm also interested to see how landonline performs after October 26, when the new broadband service is introduced.

Steve Mills
Harrison Grierson Consultants Limited
12/10/2006

Just a comment on Tony's post of 9/10/2006 - the proposal sounds feasible and would be something I would support especially for larger jobs. If it means time savings then I'm all for it.
Of course, this would only be a work around for the slowness of LOL. If the speed was fixed, no need for this work around.

Any chance of modifying this posting page to be able to include threads to posts?

Riki Wi
13/10/2006

An excellent suggestion Tony.

I think that as with most proposals to improve Landonline, the main barrier is implementation (or lack of it). I know that I - and a lot of you too, no doubt - could come up with hundreds of minor (and not so minor)possible improvements to Landonline, and between the NZIS forum, the user group, and individual correspondence with LINZ, hundreds of valid improvements HAVE been suggested... but when the 6 monthly maintenance cycle occurs, we seemingly get about half-an-hour of one programmers time, just enough to fix or improve two (count 'em, two!) minor imperfections on the esurvey side of things.

There were rumours months ago that a popular XML-esurvey software company was looking into offline plan gen, presumably also utilising the XML written at plan gen stage, but nothing has come of it obviously (yet).

The Citrix lag is certainly difficult to work around sometimes, and plan gen is the worst part of the process due to the nature and frequency of the data transmission. The next generation of internet connection/speed standards - potentially widely available within the next few years - is likely to be ADSL2 and it's variants, which unfortunately does not greatly reduce latency times over ADSL (which most of us currently use) and is therefore unlikely to be a Magic Fix for these issues. The lack of efficiency in the plan-gen process must have collectively resulted in thousands of hours of wasted time spent staring at an hourglass icon, or attempting to move the same piece of text three times.

It really is one of the biggest bricks tied about the feet of esurvey, from an end-users point of view and in terms of longterm productivity and system performance, implementing an offline plan gen system will be beneficial to all parties, LINZ not least. It would likely also shift a significant proportion of the burden for plan gen related user support to the 3rd party software vendors. Here's hoping it happens.

Terry McGrail
Ayson and Partners
25/10/2006

I don't know how feasible this would be for LINZ to implement but it is an excellent idea that LINZ should look at closely. It must be worth investing in. There are numerous advantages to carrying out plan generation off line as the speed of interaction is the biggest single LOL problem. Unless the impending increase in broadband speeds gives a quantum leap in the usability of LOL then this idea should be followed up.

I am very much in favour of this idea. An offline plan generation tool should be a mandatory step in the LOL system.

I partially disagree with the comments regarding spped issues. On complex plans the main issue I see is that the amount of time required to do plan edits on line means that your licence is completely tied up and unable to be used by others.

With respect to Tony's original post I think that there is the concern that if we generate the CGPXML data and take it offline there are issues surrounding the most current data. I would suggest that any data exported be frozen in landonline to prevent edits but also have expiry times for the offline data so that it is required to be uploaded to the LOL environment, at the latest before the close of business hours, on the same day it was downloaded.

I believe that if practitioners were consulted on this proposal there would be universal support.

Any tool like this is going to cost real money to develop and you should expect to pay for it. Our best hope for a fix may lie with third party vendors.

I know that at least one survey software company has had talks with LINZ over developing an off-line plan gen package.
Talk to your software provider & ask what they are doing. if they perceive a commercial advantage then they may well take it up. But be prepared to put your money where you mouth is.
Don't wait for LINZ to develop it - it is no benefit to them except perhaps to reduce bandwidth requirements.