If you’ve read my last post, you know that Field Day got a external makeover. It also got a lot of work done internally. For the past couple of weeks, Deeksha, Charlie and I have been working on the new data model for Field Day and the PostgreSQL database on hopper (or our portable machine). We’ve finally figured out the first pass. As you know, this could change as we move forward and test our designs, but this has gone through many field practices. There’s more than one table now — there’s pretty much one for each data point we are collecting (sensor, platform, host, site, sector, etc) all of which have unique keys and all of which will be available and populated before we use it in the field. This week, I integrated that into Field Day.

We decided that we wanted Field Day to connect to a remote database and retrieve all of the table data and store it into a local database. Field Day populates sites and sector drop downs in the ‘Take a Sample’ dropdown from which the user can choose the site and sector they want at that stop. Field Day can also check whether or not the platform and sensor they are using are in the database. Currently, Field Day fails if it can’t find the platform, but I’ll be making this more robust this week. Allowing the user to retrieve external database data will prevent inconsistencies with spelling, capitalization, human error, and the like which are problems we’ve had in the past.