Form Daily 2 - Flag.

[shadrackkibet]

Lesotho Met data entry team suggested that Flag should only allow;
T-Trace
E-Estimate
D-Dubious/Doubtful
M-Missing

For Rain all above options should be displayed and for temperature only E,D and M. So they are also suggesting this to be an editable combo box with this options.

[Patowhiz]

@smachua and @mhabimana what's your opinion on this?

[mhabimana]

@Patowhiz : Samuel shared the table below with Maxwell and I agree with Lesotho that we should not have more than what is in the table.However,Since Flags appear automatically on the flag text box, we really don't need a combo box of Flag I think and we should not allow typing of flags on text boxes unless if typed with the value in the value text boxes. Hope this makes sense.

[Patowhiz]

@mhabimana could you outline to me which elements allow specific flags,which ones allow all flags or rather which elements don't allow specific flags. If they are many and it's viable to make this check during data entry then I suggest we have database table with this information (elements with the flags they don't allow I think? ) from which the forms will just do a check at runtime and respond accordingly. Just like the way we have upper and lower limit for the elements in database.

If they are few and will never change (the element id's and flags) then we can hard code them in the current climsoft version as a data structure but this will not be the best alternative, though we can still just do it and change it in the next climsoft version

[mhabimana]

@Patowhiz : As you can see,the above table is from the database,the table is called "flags" and has got only five flag.It would be good to reference the codes to this table rather than hard code this. However,T(Trace) is applied to rainfall only but M(Missing) is applied to all the elements.

[Patowhiz]

@mhabimana what about the temperature elements, can they have the G as the flag?

[mhabimana]

@Patowhiz: D (Dubious/Suspect Data value) is applied to all. There are some softwares which G (generates/calculates/computes) values of the elements,given some initial inputs) this also can apply to all the elements,E (estimated) is also applied to all elements.