So I’ve been messing with that Lehigh Valley bike commuter routing program again, and I have made some important strides:
- I found a way to update the recommend routes easy/advanced, etc, by maintaining separate tables of these routes as linestrings (which I can add and subtract, draw and redraw), then updating the relevant field in the main table using a spatial join. The update process is now automated simply by running SQL files, one for each type of route.
- I sat down with the workflow for updating the main map table, and managed to automate much of it — everything but the SAGA tasks, though I think I can automate them too, eventually. I also managed to streamline one of the more time-consuming tasks: Generating the ascent/descent tables used to take upwards of 12 hours when I first did it (using Python within QGIS), and my next iteration (using PostGIS) took about 20 minutes, but my latest method got it down to about 57 seconds. Fifty-seven seconds! All of these are now also stored as SQL files or functions, so they are available almost at the push of a button. (My goal is a shell script putting all of this together.)
These were both pretty big deals, since they were the only things keeping the project from being truly functional. Before this, keeping the database up-to-date was like pulling teeth. Unfortunately, I decided to add some front-end functionality, testing to see if selected points are within the Lehigh Valley, and that’s been a bit of a struggle, but if I can find a host for the project I think I can go live really soon.
