For MTB I'm missing the data field "Vertical distance to next waypoint". There is only vertical distance to destination available. Does anybody know if there is a 3rd party data field available with this informaton?
TCX supports altitude fields in course points. The FIT format, astoundingly, doesn't. Time, position, distance and some metadata. It would be very hard for a third-party field to work out the altitude; probably easier if you were using an app which completely re-implemented courses, but why would you want to do that on a 5x? Should be more straightforward for the watch's internal implementation to do it - it's looking at coursepoints in the context of the whole course anyway and could extract the altitude from the closest trackpoint. It would be much easier if the file format allowed the elevation to be included.
I'm not sure you're right about FIT format?
Page 64 of 91 FIT File Types Description, Rev 2.2 thisisant.com The resultant course file is formatted as shown in Figure 11-6. In this example, each lap and course_point message can be associated to a record message through a matching timestamp. As such, each lap or course_point message does not need to contain any positional, distance, or heart rate data as this can be obtained from the matching record.
I am sure I'm right about FIT format :). I went and double-checked the source code in the SDK to see if there was an elevation field before my earlier post; source code which I'd already used to write the program referenced here for converting TCX course to FIT (ETA - looking at your earlier posts, you've already seen that program... so why would you think I don't know how the format works?). Looks as though you have the SDK yourself; take a look at fit_course_point_mesg.hpp, and you'll see it supports exactly the fields I said it did.
You're over-interpreting what that text says; it says the course point does not have to contain position or distance, but in fact they can contain them, and if you use something like the fit to csv converters included in the FIT SDK to convert a Garmin course to readable text, you'll find that they currently contain all that information. Previously, they contained position and timestamp but not distance. It's actually a bit odd they contain both; it needs one or the other to match to trackpoints so that the course point is unambiguous for a route that passes the same turn twice (out and back along the same route, or out, round a loop, then back along the initial section); but having both is redundant and indeed could be contradictory. We've found that the Fenix 5 and some Edge devices behave better if the coursepoints contain both timestamp and distance, though, which is why I started putting them in.
It wasn't my intention to question your knowledge and skills :-) Of course I know your program - it's helped me many times in the past and I'm really thankful for it :-)
I just found that statement in FIT SDK and purely hypothetically I assumed that maybe it's possible to create course point matched to a record message through timestamp (no position info in course point at all), but I don't have tools/skills to test it.
Long day yesterday, might've been feeling a bit edgy :) I might experiment some time - it wouldn't take long to build a version which only has timestamp on the coursepoint and no position info, would just need to comment a couple of lines out temporarily. It'd probably take longer to go running to test it the file, as it goes.
This problem has existed for years on the F3 even when you make a simple point to point course on the watch it has only worked when using a single waypoint and while i dont have and F5 its pretty clear the same basic errors in many of the data fields have followed through to to the F5
Yeah, saved locations in the watch can contain elevation values. Vajera's right, of course, that if the watch can figure out the nearest trackpoint to a coursepoint, that should provide the elevation if it's in the trackpoint in the first place, so it should be doable (since the watch does something of the kind to figure out when you're reaching a coursepoint anyway).
