tbg.airframes.io

[AyrForce1]

Is there any way currently to load up the search boxes from URL parameters so I can bookmark a search I want to perform each day without filling in the boxes each time?

For example:
tbg.airframes.io/search/dashboard/search?msg=whatever&or=whatever&and=whatever

Would be useful. Obviously would need to cope with escaped chars such as spaces and slashes. You could provide a link for such a bookmark URL from the most recent search performed to save an inexperienced user trying to construct one manually.

[thebaldgeek]

Interesting idea, but no. To my knowledge Node-RED does not support any URL stuffing like that.
Having just typed that, I wonder if the new dashboard 2.0 that I am using this go-around supports it. I will ask in their forums....

I removed the auto clear this update as it was, to your point, more annoying for people to have to put in 2-4 search options after every single search.

[thebaldgeek]

A real programmer just helped me out....
He helped me add wildcard (*) search to the ICAO, Rego, Type and Source text fields on the site search page.
This is a really big deal.
With this, I feel the site search is done, the search is now more powerful now than I can use (which is not saying much, but you get my point I hope).

I just need to clean up the "you searched..." section.
Working on that today. (Its important as the ADSC ICAO and Iridium Rego are not in the ADSB community database we all use).

[AyrForce1]

I removed the auto clear this update as it was, to your point, more annoying for people to have to put in 2-4 search options after every single search.

Just so you know, this isn't entirely correct. After a search if I leave the browser tab open with the results showing and with the intention of repeating the same search an hour later I sometimes return to find your page has wiped out the contents of the search boxes forcing me to re-enter everything. Doesn't wipe them straight away, but after a period.

Edit: discovered what appears to be happening. Despite the search results page not being "live", and the results essentially static at that point, your page (or Node Red ?) appears to be attempting to maintain some kind of live connection. If there's any interruption to that (router reboot, router retraining, momentary WiFi or ISP routing glitch, etc.) then your page pops up a "Connection lost" message and when it comes back it wipes the search boxes out. Not a problem for me as I've coded around it with search presets anyway, but thought I'd mention it just in case you feel like addressing it for others.

[thebaldgeek]

I wrote a long reply and then deleted it.

Thanks for the feedback.

[AyrForce1]

Is anyone else finding the acars search isn't currently working? Hopefully a temp glitch or just a reboot needed.
Last search result more than 30 hours ago now at 2024-12-07 02:25:32.

[diamond chap]

Is anyone else finding the acars search isn't currently working? Hopefully a temp glitch or just a reboot needed.
Last search result more than 30 hours ago now at 2024-12-07 02:25:32.

Not just you, I'm finding the same.

[thebaldgeek]

Please don't forget that airframes.io has 3 months of ACARS in the search.

[thebaldgeek]

Short version: Search should be working again.

Long version: There were many issues that happen all at once that caused more than just the search to break (Tip: don't do a vacuum command on a sqlite db that is in / on a ram disk unless you have just over double the partition space free).
Wild card * is back working with ICAO, Reg, Type and source. I'd like to tweak the source names to make them more useful going forward, but have not nailed down just how yet.
The 'you searched' is back working again, its a bit busy, but the " either side help show any whitespace you may have added (intentionally or not).
If you search for a specific ICAO you get the db airframe details. This will become very important with the next big site update - more about that in the future.
The time taken number is mostly for testing the efficiently of different search patterns, but I figure its also a nice reminder of the speed bump pain getting to where we are.

I have tested returning 200 results, but it is still a bit ugly so have dropped that option. (Personally I am wondering why your search gives back 200 and do you actually read every. single. result?)

[AyrForce1]

I have tested returning 200 results, but it is still a bit ugly so have dropped that option. (Personally I am wondering why your search gives back 200 and do you actually read every. single. result?)

Thanks for the update.

One reason why a lot of results might be returned is when text searching for an airport ICAO to try to identify if anything is intending departing or arriving at that airport, and where said airport is a popular "alternate" or "en-route" airport. Of course there are ways to eliminate some of that with the NOT field. But I do actually "read" every result in the sense that it's very easy for a human to skim-read these and bypass the ones that just look like aircraft checking weather en-route or listing said airport as alternate.

On this note, I do actually have a suggestion (which I implemented to great effect on another ACARS site) which you may like to consider, assuming your framework doesn't get in the way.

In the results, next to every ICAO (only in the ICAO column), put a small "x" button. When clicked, this message and all other messages emanating from the same ICAO get dynamically removed from the results (can be done with client-side script to avoid any further server request). This is extremely useful because as soon as I decide a particular aircraft isn't of interest to me I can rapidly remove all results from it, which is handy when the aircraft vomits 30+ messages onto ACARS which happen to be caught by my search. Once I've eliminated quite a few non-interesting aircraft the search results are quickly pared down making it easy to browse 200 or many more results (for my own needs I'm rarely interested in anything older than 24 hours anyway, but others might have the need for that).

[thebaldgeek]

Interesting.
Since the ICAO is in the message 90% of the time (" AES:AE041F GES:02 2 .71488S FANS-1/A CPDLC MESSAGE:"), you can drop them via the NOT text option.
I will add it to your request to not line break in the middle of words.

Also noted that we can walk back the 48 hours to 24 hours.

[thebaldgeek]

Interesting.
Since the ICAO is in the message 90% of the time (" AES:AE041F GES:02 2 .71488S FANS-1/A CPDLC MESSAGE:"), you can drop them via the NOT text option.
I will add it to your request to not line break in the middle of words.

Also noted that we can walk back the 48 hours to 24 hours.

[Eagle130]

Thanks for the update - site is running great IMO and the search time reduction is extremely noticeable!

I agree with most of the sentiments from AyrForce1 besides the timings of message return. For me, I like to review the messages going back as far as I can as I often get 1 or 2 opportunities per week to browse through, hence its easy to miss stuff. Framework allowing, would there be any possibility of implementing a time period search functionality?

That way AyrForce1 could filter to only look at the past 24h and I could look at 48h to as long as needed (maybe capped at 1 week max ?). Im aware the airframes.io site has this functionality but the search function on that site is extremely lacking when compared to your site, makes it tricky to find what I am actually looking for in the end.

So personally I wouldn't agree with walking back the 48h to 24h but that might just be me, and I am happy to accept it if the wider consensus is no one needs the 48h.

[AyrForce1]

Since the ICAO is in the message 90% of the time (" AES:AE041F GES:02 2 .71488S FANS-1/A CPDLC MESSAGE:"), you can drop them via the NOT text option.

3 problems.
1. Unless I've misunderstood, you can only omit 1 thing using NOT. How do I omit several ICAOs this way? In any case...
2. It's not 90% from where I sit. A lot of what I nuke are "alternates" and "weather requests" messages which do not contain it.
3. I don't know which ICAO's until I scroll to them. To then omit them requires re-posting the request to the server and starting from scratch. Remember, when I see the first entry for a Jet 2 A330 that I'm not interested in I click my little "x" button and it and all the other entries for that aircraft (that I haven't read or even reached yet) disappear without request to the server and without affecting my scroll position within the results.

I'm not just fantasising - I've actually implemented this on the other ACARS site and it's enormously useful. I may implement it on yours too but I raised it because I'm sure others would find it as useful as I have.

If you're keeping score on the suggestions I have more which others might find useful too, if you're interested

[AyrForce1]

Im aware the airframes.io site has this functionality but the search function on that site is extremely lacking when compared to your site

To avoid confusion I'm assuming you mean app.airframes.io (since airframes.io redirects there) since both that and TBG's site are on airframes.io.
The search on that other site is certainly lacking, but also rather broken. If I search for text like "RCH600" then it might actually miss messages which have RCH600 in the message text, but if I search for "RCH6" those missing messages (containing RCH600) now show. This makes it impossible to ever know if you have been given the full and correct results. I've only spotted one such "bug" on TBG's search, but his is erring on the side of caution by including messages that didn't match the search request (rather than the other way around) so it's not so much of an issue and I haven't reported it (yet...)

[AyrForce1]

So personally I wouldn't agree with walking back the 48h to 24h but that might just be me, and I am happy to accept it if the wider consensus is no one needs the 48h.

Given the back-end is SQL based in some form, I suspect doing "LIMIT 100" (or LIMIT 200 ) is more efficient on server resources than testing "WHERE timestamp >= ref_timestamp" on every entry to achieve the desired cut-off point.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to use a checkbox or editbox option to default to "100" which the user can extend to 200 or 300 if he desires more. That should be relatively simple to implement and would appear to meet anyone's likely preference. Even though I said 24h is usually enough, occasionally it's useful to go further (such as if a scheduled flight didn't take off). I should just point out, in case it's not obvious, if you do provide such an option, and especially if it's in the form of an edit box that defaults to the more efficient "100" but which the user can change to a higher number of his choice, you should validate the input and still hard limit it on the server end to avoid hackers abusing the submission process to request a million results.

[thebaldgeek]

Its a shame we cant post screenshots here, but I get why its disabled....
@AyrForce1, please remember that I am NOT a coder, I use Node-RED, there simply is not an option to allow for a check box in the table node, so no mater how much you push it, I simply cant do some requests.
So yes, please continue to develop your ACARS site.... I'd love to shut my site down and point people to yours.

@Eagle130. I tested 200 results on Monday this week for about an hour. I was not happy with the way the table formatted the results. The ICAO ect were centered on the ACARS messages and there was no option to put zebra stripes in, so all the search results of raw ACARS just blended together and it was really hard even for me to read where one stopped and the other started.
So until I get that sorted, we are locked to 100 results, but I will figure out a way to format the table better and then we can do 100, 200 or perhaps even 300 (which is just getting crazy).
I tested a simple check box, 100 by default, 200 when the 'more' box was checked. That part of it worked fine.
I like the idea of a time range, but don't think its worth the fuss at the moment. Perhaps when we get the 200+ results sorted I will revisit the idea.

Its kinda fun that everyone thinks its still just the past 48 hours....

@AyrForce1, I think you have outgrown my site, hit up https://jlogger.net/
Get a user/pass from the vdl groupsIO guys. That search for that site is so complicated I cant figure it out, sounds perfect for you.

[AyrForce1]

No please don't shut it down. Yours is the best of the two currently. I'm merely offering suggestions. I realise you are constrained by NR or your knowledge of it, but I've no way of knowing what you can or cannot do so I simply offer the suggestions in the hope and have been trying to keep the suggestions as simple as possible. Don't worry, I don't intend making any more.

[thebaldgeek]

Update.
The site search is no longer the past 48 hours.
Still locked to 100 results - for now.

[thebaldgeek]

The site search seems fast and stable at 120 hours, 5 days.
Its searching between 3 and 3.5 million ACARS each time.
Most search results return in well under 1 second.
Unless some here have a really good discussion of why it should be longer, I think I am going to leave it at that depth.

I see some folks using the * wildcard. Good to see.
i want to write up a few search tips and perhaps do a YouTube on the site and site tips, I'd like to include some real world search tips.
If you can share some here, that would be great.
I'd love to understand how folks are using the search.

The site home page still can take some time to load now and then (Reddit found the site?).
If you are after the search page, just bookmark it. https://tbg.airframes.io/search/dashboard/search
It used to change a lot so I told folks to only bookmark the home page, but now that I have split the site into micro-servers it should 'never' change.
It also loads way faster than the home page.

Thanks for all your support. It was a personally rough year. March 22nd is still painful, hopefully the next year can be a little better.