August 6^th, 2001 APT Visit Planner Meeting at 3:00pm in N310

Jesse, Ron, Leslie, Andy, Steve, Trish, Rusty

A set of minimal requirements for a first release was handed out. It is available on the web:

http://ra.stsci.edu/apst/apt/apt-visit-planner/requirements/detailed/00/minimum.txt

Please look over them and send comments to apt-vp@stsci.edu or bring them to next week's meeting.

(The raw feedback is at http://ra.stsci.edu/apst/apt/apt-visit-planner/requirements/detailed/00/rawfeedback.txt )

• 00.1.4 If the observer requirement of a scheduling constraint is not specified in a visit, then the scheduling constraint will be treated as if it has no schedulable windows.
  • We refocused the issue here to be on invalid or incomplete data. If there is a guarantee to the Visit Planner that the proposal data is complete and valid, then there is no concern and we don't need this requirement.

    However, what is more likely, is that the Visit Planner should expect to handle invalid data. For this, we decided that the Visit Planner should not proceed and it should indicate to the user that there is a problem with the proposal data.

    But, the Visit Planner should only reject invalid data which is pertinent to the Visit Planner's function.

  • We also realized that we are not sure of the behavior of the APT SpreadSheet with regard to invalid and incomplete data. [Jesse will send email to apt-req asking about this.]
  • We decided that Scheduling Windows Calenders (SWCs) should be displayed only for those constraints whose observer requirements are explicitly specified by the user, ie, the SWCs with observer requirements that used default values should NOT be displayed.

    This behavior can be table driven so as to be observatory dependent.

  • Some constraints should not be displayed that are schedulable at all times. This should be observatory dependent and table driven.
  • [Not discussed, but an important related issue is how are default values determined, and how can the Visit Planner know an observer requirement is using the default value. Is there a notion of default values in the APT framework.]

• 00.1.5 The CP shall have a display/controller to set the starting and ending dates for computing scheduling windows.
  • It was pretty much unanimous for HST that the user should not set the start and end dates. This would best be handled by a table that knows the dates for each cycle.
  • For linked visits that have already executed, we should access the PMDB to determine the start time and set a constraint for that visit.
  • Until APT has PMDB access, we should set the start time to the beginning of the cycle of the proposal and extend the end time until two years from the current date.

    Constraints for executed visits can be manually set using betweens.

• 00.2.1.2-00.2.16 (These are requirements about the text that goes with each Scheduling Windows Calender.)

  These all have references to having text displayed in color which we all agree should have alternate indicators to alert the user to the schedulability of the corresponding visit or scheduling constraint.

  These requirements should be re-worded to leave the mechanism for alerting the user somewhat vague. We'll let the developer choose something for the first round, then get feedback for refining to a better mechanism.

• 00.2.2.3 For scheduling constraint SWCs, left clicking at a point on the SWC shall display values of the associated observer requirements that allow the constraint to be "schedulable".

  This will be reworded to not make explicit reference to left clicking and leave it up to the developer with feedback from users.

• 00.2.3.2 For a visit, if the scheduling windows do not include all scheduling constraints, then the "More Info..." dialog will state one of the following reasons as appropriate

  We have concern about how much users will be aware of the distinction between deleting constraints from the proposal and not including constraints for the purpose of computing schedulability.

  This requirement will be re-written to have the warning somehow upfront and not "hidden" under the "More Info..." dialog.

• We'll start with 00.3 next time.

http://ra.stsci.edu/apst/apt/apt-visit-planner/

http://ra.stsci.edu/apst/apt/apt-visit-planner/