Data Loss in a Sync and a few other things

[jlehman]

A week or so ago, we ran a cave rescue scenario at Mitchell Caverns just north of I-40 in the desert. My original plan was to run this totally offline because I knew that cell service was spotty at best, and I didn't order the sat truck in time for it to deploy (scheduled maintenance). Here are my observations:

I synced the mission on my way out the door. When I arrived I got everybody checked-in without incident. When I went to create team assignment forms, however, it seemed that they didn't want to print unless there was a net connection. Is this true? When this seemed to be the case, I fired up a Verizon data connection that was slow with high latency. This slow connection made use of MM VERY slow. A drag and drop of a team member into a team took several seconds. But, the connection did allow me to print forms. After several minutes of doing this, I decided to return to an offline state after a sync.

When I returned to working offline, things were much faster, but my radio log was gone. I had been keeping the radio log when offline. When I fired up the connection, I synced the offline mission. After completing my stint online, I synced it with the offline mission again. All of my radio log data disappeared, and my team assignments were fouled up. I ended up with the same person entered twice in a team list, but yet they wouldn't print as being part of the team. I would have to remove them completely and re-add them.

My guess is that there was some sort of timing out going on in the sync process, and it was deferring to the online version (no radio log). Any ideas?

I ran into a couple of other things. These I haven't searched for in the fora, so I am sorry if they have already been discussed.

I noticed that there was a limitation to the number of people on a team (8 or 9, I can't remember). Normally this is fine, and I suspect it has to do with span of control. Cave rescues are resource intensive, and it can take 10 or more people just to move a litter around under ground. As such, when I had a couple of teams combine, I couldn't assemble them into a single team the way that they were working.

I also found that I couldn't have the same person serve as ops and IC. Depending on the scope of the incident, a single person may serve in multiple sections. Maybe that was an issue with the lagginess of my connection. Yes?

Thanks,
JL

[Radishworks]

When I went to create team assignment forms, however, it seemed that they didn't want to print unless there was a net connection. Is this true?

Certain forms should print off-line.  Team Assignments are one of those forms.  This was a bug and should now work OK.

My guess is that there was some sort of timing out going on in the sync process, and it was deferring to the online version (no radio log). Any ideas?

Happily MM keeps very good logs of any errors.  The exact error was logged that caused your radio log to have an issue.  It was very specific to one of your entries in the way it was typed.  It was a bug that's now fixed and shouldn't be a problem again.  Thanks for the report.

I noticed that there was a limitation to the number of people on a team

Yes, you guessed it, its a span of control thing.  When we need to have a team bigger than the limit we create multiple teams with the same assignment.  I don't see this limitation changing, at least not anytime soon.

I also found that I couldn't have the same person serve as ops and IC.

I agree depending on the size of the event, one person can serve in more than one role.  But currently MM only supports one assignment per person.  In theory one person could be IC and a member of a team, etc., things start to get very complicated in these cases and could make the UI confusing.  My advice is to add a log entry that a person is sharing more than one role.  Log entries are how changes in command staff are documented anyhow.