If you are a newcomer to the system, read the beginners introduction to online wallets first.
There are three quite different reasons:
These are simply the scanned images (or digital photographs) of each page of the original survey notes. They should be named notesXXX.jpg where "XXX" can be anything you like. Typically we have the scanned pages called notes1.jpg, notes2.jpg, notes3.jpg.
It is important that you use use the .jpg (JPEG) file format, and definitely not PNG (very voluminous) or PDF (very hard to re-use elsewhere). Set the scanner at 300 dpi and adjust the contrast of the image after scanning by using photo-editing software to enhance the writing. Also please crop each image to just the area containing the survey data.
As soon as the notes have been scanned you should (a) copy them to a USB stick or email them to someone, (b) upload the entire online wallet to the expo server in Cambridge expo.survex.com. This is so that these precious files are backed-up as soon as possible. (Assuming you have done the key-pair procedure, do the upload by sFTP as you do for photos, but to the directory described in the introduction to online wallets.)
All the other files are part of the multi-step process of producing the cave survey - see Creating a new cave... for the full list of steps. The notesXXX.jpg files need to be at moderately high resolution but the plan and elevation files are usually fine at 200 dpi. So if the caver has scanned these at high resolution you can reduce the size of these files without damange.
We keep an index of how many of those steps have been completed in two places:
but the contents.json file has another,completely different function:
it may be the only online record that connects the wallet number to the cave identifier. So if a future cave surveyor deperately needs
to consult the original cave survey, it can be done by, e.g.
grep -rl "2018-dm-07" expofiles/surveyscans
will find and list all the wallets which contain survey data for cave 2018-dm-07 (which is also known as "Homecoming Cave" and which will
have a different Austrian Kataster number issued for it in due course).
The link between a .svx file and the wallet should also be recorded in the .svx file itself using the "*ref:" field, e.g.
*ref 2018#06 ; the #number is on the clear pocket containing the original notesBut sometime in mid-Expo 2015 everyone stopped using the survex template file and so this information was not recorded since then. This will be fixed by hand-editing in due course. (Note that many old .svx files were processed with an older version of survex which did not suppport this feature and so a comment was used instead.)
Troggle produces very useful auto-generated reports of the status of the wallets and the survex files
The paper tick-list tracks the following steps for each online wallet:
(where the "json file updated" step only refers to the initial editing of the json file to ensure that it has the right people, date and cave identifier and name).
A fully-populated and complete contents.json file looks like this:
{
"description written": false,
"website updated": false,
"people": [
"Dickon Morris",
"Jon Arne Toft",
"Becka Lawson"],
"elev not required": false,
"cave": "2018-dm-07",
"survex not required": false,
"qms written": true,
"plan not required": false,
"electronic survey": false,
"plan drawn": true,
"date": "2018-07-13",
"elev drawn": true,
"description url": "",
"survex file": "caves-1626/2018-dm-07/2018-dm-07.svx",
"name": "Homecoming cave"
}
Yes, this is a programming format
(standardised in 2013) and every comma is critical.
When entering people's names it is important not to use any funny characters (such as "?") because peoples names here are used by the software to construct filenames for the surveying to-do lists. And "?" (for instance) is illegal in filenames on Windows computers.
The folder containing all the wallets for the year, e.g.
/home/expo/expofiles/surveyscans/2018/will, after the appropriate magic has happened, contain a file
walletindex.html
which lists all the wallets which have uncompleted tasks, and lists all the people responsible for completing them. You can see the walletindex.html for 2018 . Also there will be a linked file for each individual for their personal to-do list, and each online wallet contains its own index.html file which describes the survey production status for all the wallets.
The magic also creates walletindex.html files in each folder /2018/2018#nn/ and creates or updates a webpage for each person listed in any of the contents.json files in the folder/2018/ e.g. Becka Lawson.html.
If you want to see what the files are in each online wallet then look at
expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2018/
and you can navigate to the individual wallet folders too and look directly at the files there.
All this magic is created by a script wallets.py.
When, at the beginning of expo, you create the folder in expofiles/surveyscans/ for the current year, e.g. /2019/, you will copy wallets.py from the previous year's folder. You will do this on your own laptop or on the expo laptop.
You will also manually create a number of subfolders, e.g. 2019#01, 2019#02 etc. to be ready for the influx of new trip surveys.
Next you will test that the magic works: open a terminal in expofiles/surveyscans/2018/ and run
python wallets.py
This will create a default contents.json and walletindex.html in each online wallet subfolder and also a walletindex.html in the /2018/ folder.
This script works fine on Linux (Debian, Xubuntu, etc.) and also now works fine in the Windows 10 bash system.
Ideally the cavers who are scanning their notes and typing in the survey data will also be updating the contents.json file in their wallet. In your dreams.
The first difficulty when editing a blank contents.json for a newly-created wallet is finding out which cave the wallet describes. The lable on the plastic wallet may say "radaghost to blitzkriek" (or whatever) but without the name of the cave you can't find the .svx files as you don't know that you need to look in e.g. loser/caves-1626/2018-dm-07/. Usually the cave number is written by hand on the label of the wallet. Sometimes it will just give the informal name of the cave,e.g. "Homecoming",instead of the identifier "2018-dm-07" you want.
A regular task during expo is for a nerd to review the contents.json files for recently created wallets and to check that names, dates and cave numbers are correct. You will run
python wallets.py
regularly, after every batch of survey data is entered or scanned.
This will always overwrite all the walletindex.html files but it will never touch the contents.json files.
You will also regularly synchronise your laptop
and the expo laptop with
expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscan/2018/
and this is where it gets tricky.
expo.survex.com/expofiles/ is not under version control, so the most recent person to upload the contents of /2018/ will overwrite everyone else's work. This does not matter for the autogenerated files, but it is vital that it does not overwrite all the painfully manually edited contents.json files. Which is very easy to do. This does mean that this is one of the cases where it may be better to use rsync rather than an FTP client such as Filezilla.
The script detects if there are notesX.jpg planX.jpg and elevX.jpgfiles present, and produces a reminder/warning if they are not,even if these have all been scanned and given different names.
The job of the checker (perhaps on a second pass) if to rename files so that these warnings disappear. But if tunnel or therion files have already been produce don't rename anything.
As all this is not under version control the timestamps of the files are really quite important in figuring things out when someone makes an update mistake.
So script wallets.py has been fixed so that
A copy of useful rsync scripts is kept in a file such as expo.survex.com/expofiles/rsync2018toserver. Always run it with the -n option first, to see what overwriting you will do.
The python script does more than just re-format the contents.json data into different formats. It also
Things it might do in future (if someone gets around to it) include:
- checking the cave number specified matches the folder for the .svx file,
- checking that the *ref: filed in the survex file is the same as the wallet name
- detecting whether there is a description or a list of QMs in the survex file,
- accepting a list of .svx files and not just one (a very common thing),
- checking the name of the cave against the cave number,
- checking whether the website page even exists for this cave,
- being more intelligent about .topo files and thus the lack of scan files,
- checking the date is in the recent past etc.
to be written...
For prospecting and surface surveying it is not clear whether the default folder for the url link should be repo ::loser:: surface/1623/allplateau.svx When there are more than one .svx file there seems to be no way of recording the list in contents.json so it is impossible to tell what was done on that trip or whether there is anything missing. This is especially true if it was electronic and the .topo files are missing. Wookey confirms that this is the case. HINT When there are a lot on wallets all with the same cave, make your own template with the cave name and the right folder prefix for the svx folder (in the loser repo) and copy it in to all those wallet folders - overwriting the blank template produced by the wallets.py # Update March 2019 a consolidated to-do list of the last 3 years on the server: http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2016-18/walletindex.html This is a hand-done kludge and only the first level of links works - which is to the individual person's page. the lists for the last 3 years individually and all the links are working for each wallet page: both local links to your PC and to the right location of the .svx files on the troggle server. http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2016/walletindex.html http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2017/walletindex.html http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2018/walletindex.html and all the names of people have been hand-edited in the .json files to be consistent and identical. 2015 has now been done stand-alone but there is no consolidated report for 2015-18 yet. The big task was editing everyone's names to be exactly the same version of the name as used in other years. For 2014 and earlier one needs to do a lot more data entry. The contents.json files for 2014 and earlier do not say who the people were on the trip. So we would need to work from the svx files (where they contain the *ref: wallet ID), original plastic wallets (and the scanned drawings and notes – which are incomplete) to enter that data. This is made much easier by the troggle reports http://expo.survex.com/survey_scans/ http://expo.survex.com/expedition/2014 http://expo.survex.com/survey/2018%2330 This is probably not worth doing except maybe for specific critical connections. The script runs without errors on each of the years 1999-2014, but the results are less useful, e.g. see http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/1999/ or http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2014/