Two faults, and the first was a design mistake of mine.
The choice was written only as the award override, to keep the imported
CNTY as a record of what HAMLOG said. But CNTY is what the comparison
READS, so the contact went on disagreeing for ever: settle a hundred
rows, run the comparison again, get the same hundred back. The reasoning
was about preserving evidence; the effect was a button with no visible
consequence anywhere, which is indistinguishable from one that does
nothing. This is the operator's own log, and correcting a field in it is
the point of the exercise. The district now lands in CNTY as well as in
the award reference.
And the settled rows stayed on screen, which made the same button look
broken a second time. They are dropped as they are applied — locally,
rather than by re-running the comparison, which reads the whole log and
would be seconds of silence on a remote database to be told what is
already known. The agree/disagree counters follow.
The comparison could show two hundred contacts where the log and the
database name different districts, and leave the operator with nothing to
do about any of them but open each QSO and edit it by hand.
Now each row carries the two values as buttons: click the district you
keep, then apply. There are shortcuts for keeping one source everywhere,
and applying is a separate act — clicking through two hundred rows with
each one written as it is clicked would make a slip permanent before the
reading was finished.
The choice is written as the contact's AWARD REFERENCE, not over the
imported CNTY, and that distinction is the point. CNTY is what the
downloaded log said; overwriting it would destroy the evidence the
comparison runs on, and the next comparison would agree with itself and
prove nothing. The override is the operator's decision, it is what the
award engine counts, and it beats both sources. So the log keeps saying
what it said, the database keeps saying what it says, and the contact
counts for the district that was chosen.
The buttons show the districts themselves rather than a tick box: someone
arbitrating between RO-19 and KO-05 should be picking a value they can
read, not remembering which source a checked box stood for.
SATELLITES: the field read the list once, when the details panel first
mounted — which is at startup. A list saved in Preferences afterwards
therefore did nothing until a restart. It comes from App now, which
already reloads the lists when Preferences close.
RDA COMPARE: a failed comparison wrote its error into the message beside
the FILL DISTRICTS button, a row above — the error appeared under a
button nobody had pressed while the one that had been pressed showed
nothing, which reads as 'the button does nothing'. It has its own message
now, and reports the two results that look like silence: no disagreement
at all, and no Russian contacts to compare. Both buttons say what they
are doing while they do it, and the comparison logs before it starts
reading — on a remote MySQL that read is seconds of quiet.
A log imported from HAMLOG.online carries the Russian district in CNTY, and the
offline RDA database has its own answer for the same contact. Which wins is a
real question — but only if the two are independent. If HAMLOG's value is itself
a lookup in the same kind of database, there is nothing to arbitrate and a
precedence rule would be ceremony around a redundancy.
So this measures instead of deciding: Settings → RDA gains a read-only compare
that reports agreements, disagreements, and the contacts where only one side
knows, then lists the disagreements — callsign, date, both districts, whether
the database answer was a DATED record (the award administrators' own fact) or
the callsign's current district (an assumption), and whether the QSO is
confirmed on HAMLOG (their value has then been through a match of two logs).
It changes nothing in the log. What to do about a conflict is the next decision,
and it should be taken with the operator's own numbers in hand.
Also: the four HAMLOG fields become filterable, so 'never sent there' is a
filter rather than a guess. A field that can be written and not read back is
half a feature — pinned by a test against the bulk-editable list.
rouggy