Alternative route issuesFORUMS HOME SEARCH FORUMS

Hii John,

I've just used the Alternative Route feature for the first time and have noticed some anomolies.  (See route 1331750.)

First, when I open the route from the 'Share' link, it keeps on animating after the marker has reached the end of the route.  I also notice that the route length is indicated to be much longer than it realy is.  Could it be adding the detour rather than treating it as an alternative?

Second, If I select the alternative route the directions are shown but, if I select my original route, the part that has been bypassed by the detour has lost its directions.

Regards, Martyn

Thanks for flagging that up Martyn. The first point will need investigating - not sure what's happened there. I suggest editing and resaving the route to see if this fixes it. I'm not sure what you mean by the second point though. When I toggle the detour in and out the directions on the swapped out section look like they are reinstated correctly e.g. No 23 starting "At the end of Flower Walk...". 

Hi John. Re second point... "At the end of Flower Walk" is on the alternative route.  These are showning OK.  Its the directions on the original route between the ends of the detour that seem to have gone AWOL at some point.  I entered them first, before I plotted the detour, and did not explicity delete them.

I guess there may be confusion over which is the primary route and which is the detour.  As far as I can see, there is no system distinction... it's simply a matter of which one happened to be selected when the route was last saved.  In my mind, the tow path route was the original route and Flower Walk the detour.  Apologies if it appeared the other way round.

Hi Martyn - you'll need to save it as you want it to be seen, so if the Flower Walk part is the detour, yiou should swap this over before you save the route.

OK.  Understood.

The issue is that the directions I had originally placed on the variation that runs by the river have somnehow disappeared without me explicitly deleting them.

It's hard to know why that might have happened Martyn. There may have been some odd glitch with the editing of the detour but unless a problem can be conistently recreated it's hard to fix. I've corrected the recorded distance for your route though, so the animation should end correctly now.

Many thanks.  I need to edit the missing detials back in so I will look out in case the issue occurs again.  If it does, I'll try to identify the action that causes it.

John,

I've reproduced the disappearing directions issue.  It only takes the simplest of routes - see 1348439.

• Create a simple route.
• Add three directions: one near the start (A), one in the middle (B) and one near the end (C).
• Plot a diversion from somewhere between A and B to somewhere between B and C.
• Save.
• As expected, switching from the main route to the diversion makes the intermediate direction (B) disappear form the direction list.  However, on switching back, the text of direction B has disappeared (although the icon I added seems to be intact.)

Martyn

Thanks Martyn, but I tried the steps you gave and it worked OK for me! I must have done something different to you somehow.

Reflecting over the weekend... I went to the 'View Route' screen to switch between the main route and the alternative and I think this is when the direction text disappeared.  My impression is that, while I was editing, both sets of text were present.  Without being able to see the impact on the background database, it's difficult for me to experiment rigourously but I have been able to make it happened twice now.

It might be hard to get to the bottom of this one! 

Hi John,

I've tested and the problem outlined in post 2815/D/1 is fixed.  Many thanks.

I wondered if the same underlying issue might have been the cause of the problem outlined in this post regarding alternative routes.  I have tested and this is not the case.  However, I now have a very simple and reproducable example for you.

• Make a copy of route 1482487.  (Testing destroys some of the directions and you may wish to return to the original for subsequent re-testing, hence the copy.)
• Open the copy in the editor (I'm working on a PC in Chrome.)
• Open the 'Directions' panel and note directions 21 ("At the time of writing...") to 25 ("At the bottom of...").
• Now select the alternative route (river side) and save the change.
• Re-open the route in the viewer.  (I closed Plotaroute and restarted just to ensure I was picking up the saved copy.)
• Select the first route (Flower Walk) and look at the directions.  The original directions 21 to 25 have vanished.

I hope this is of help in running this to ground.

(By the way, great to see the full page article about Plotaroute in the latest "Computer Active" magazine!)

Martyn

Thanks for the detailed example Martyn, that really helped. It should be fixed now.

We saw the Computer Active article. We weren't aware they were doing it, so it was a nice surprise. For anyone interested, see pages 38-39 in Issue 602 (24 March - 6 April) of "Computer Active", the UK's biggest-selling computer magazine.

John

Hi John,

I've just retested this one and I am still seeing the same problem.  Is my existing route fundamentally corrupted?  Will I only see the fix with new routes that have alternatives plotted?

Martyn

Yes, existing detours may be corrupted I'm afraid Martyn. You may need to create them.  Following the steps you outlined in your post below should work OK now though.

John

Hello John,

Thanks for the information. If I delete the detour from the existing route and then recreate it, will that be OK? I'd like to avoid recreating the whole route including the main route from scratch, if possible.

By the way, how does one delete a detour?  I looked the other day and could not see how to do this.

Martyn

Yes, it should be fine if you just recreate the detour. To delete a detour right-click on it to bring up further options.

John

Just spotted an issue with deleting a detour... the directions on the main route at the point where the detour begins and ends are also deleted.

Hold that last comment.  It only appears to happen under certain circumstances and I've not worked out what they are.  I think it's if I click back and forth between the main and alternative route before deleting the detour.