Naming Restrictions

Former Member over 14 years ago

My Garmin 5212 allows me to use 10 characters for a waypoint name, 15 for a route and 20 for a track.
Homeport recognises my SD card as coming from a 5212.
Homeport allows me to put in far too many characters than my 5212 will allow.
When I upload the SD card data to the 5212, I seem to loose waypoints, etc, as the 5212 attempts to truncate the names and renames them.
When I download the information to put back into Homeport it gets really scrambled.
Makes me glad that I saved the original data elsewhere.
So now I know that Homeport has no backdoor that gets around the number of character limitations I have to count the letters in each of my 1,500 waypoints, 20 routes and 20 tracks to ensure that they do no get corrupted. I need a pointy stick and a magnifying glass and to hold back on the gin and tonics!
I thought that computers were numerate?
Is it not possible to get Homeport to recognise the plotter limitations and limit the field sizes? If not, could it at least give a character count?

0 Former Member over 14 years ago

Devices' character limitations have been a tricky issue. Devices do not advertise their character limitations. Supposing they did, what behavior would you expect as a user?

HomePort preventing you from entering too many characters does not seem ideal. Before you create any data, you would have to tell HomePort what device you want to use any data with. This gets even trickier when you throw in multiple devices and different versions of the device having different limitations.

HomePort letting you create data within HomePort's limitations seem more reasonable. In this case, one could argue that at the point when HomePort detects that you are going to use this data on a particular device (drag and drop), HomePort can truncate the data to fit the device's limitations. But the device already performs the truncation. So there isn't any value in HomePort truncating it beforehand.

I think your idea of showing a character count is a smart idea. HomePort users shouldn't need a pointy stick and magnifying glass; and we shouldn't have to hold back on the gin and tonic :). I think the 'briefcase folder' idea you mentioned in another post has its merits too. I think there could be room for a nicer way to manage these limitations, especially if there is enough users who are running into this issue.

0 Former Member over 14 years ago

OK, point taken. That is, at the time of creation, Homeport does not know what device would be loaded with that data. I guess many users have multiple devices.
I use a utility called GPSU to manipulate data. In GPSU, I can set the device that I will be using the data with and then it limits the field length according to its knowledge of that device, but the field lengths can be changed in case GPSU gets it wrong.
So making the field lengths adjustable might be a solution. Those people using multiple devices would then set their field lengths to the most constricting device, then their data would suitable for all their devices.
I am convinced that I lost data when transferring to my 5212. The waypoint count on the 5212 was lower that the waypoint count on the original data in Homeport. I think the truncating or renumbering resulted in duplicate names that were deleted. When I trimmed my fieldlengths and reloaded the data, the waypoint count was identical. If I had not checked my first upload and then continued to use the 5212 and then downloaded the data after use, I would have lost data.

0 PAULGOOCH over 14 years ago

Why not just make the field lengths user configurable within the "options" ?

0 rwidman over 14 years ago

OK, point taken. That is, at the time of creation, Homeport does not know what device would be loaded with that data. I guess many users have multiple devices.
I use a utility called GPSU to manipulate data. In GPSU, I can set the device that I will be using the data with and then it limits the field length according to its knowledge of that device, but the field lengths can be changed in case GPSU gets it wrong.
So making the field lengths adjustable might be a solution. Those people using multiple devices would then set their field lengths to the most constricting device, then their data would suitable for all their devices.
I am convinced that I lost data when transferring to my 5212. The waypoint count on the 5212 was lower that the waypoint count on the original data in Homeport. I think the truncating or renumbering resulted in duplicate names that were deleted. When I trimmed my fieldlengths and reloaded the data, the waypoint count was identical. If I had not checked my first upload and then continued to use the 5212 and then downloaded the data after use, I would have lost data.

It's easy to back up data and/or make duplicates.

We all have to make adjustments based on our hardware, softwarer, an intended use. For instance, I have only two "waypoints" so there's no limitation there, but I created routes with hundreds of points (or "turns") and found that my plotter limits routes to 250 points so I had to break the routes up into segments. This left me with more than the maximum number of routes (20) for my plotter so I have to keep am SD card on the boat with three folders (in my case, "North", "South", and "Local") and upload them as needed.

I have two plotters so after uploading the routes I have to clone them to the other unit.

If I had been the one to design the hardware and software, It would have worked better for me but probably not as well for you.