Airport Parking Spots

[benclark]

Let's say I have a list of parking spots by gate number, lat/long and radius. Is it possible for ADE to take that list and create all the spots in one go or will I have to manually add and edit all 300+ of them? If this isn't currently possible I wonder if it's something that could be added to the next version?

 

[scruffyduck]

ADE does not have the capability to import data from text files. I don't recall it being asked for before and it would not be trivial to implement

 

[=rk=]

Could he not compile, or export the airport to .xml, find the description of parking spaces, make his data match that format and hack his parking layout into the airport manually?

 

[benclark]

ADE does not have the capability to import data from text files. I don't recall it being asked for before and it would not be trivial to implement

Thanks for the reply Jon, honestly I'm surprised it hasn't been asked before, with airports these days having hundreds of marked parking spots and before you even get in to adding GA parking too it's a lot of work to add each gate one at a time.

I did wonder about Rick's idea, if there was someway to insert the data in to the ad4 file directly, OR is there some kind of xml format that ADE could import from the Import XML option?

 

[=rk=]

It is as simple as choosing the Export for X option in the Tools drop down menu.

For illustrative purposes, we'll edit the #7 parking.

Here is the section in the XML file

and the edited entry

here is the XML file imported into ADE. You can see that not all airport data is stored in the airport XML and you'd have to make provision.

However, the technique clearly works for manually editing parking spots.

 

[scruffyduck]

Another way to get XML for an airport that might help. Select the Airport Reference Point, Right Click > Show XML

Or if you have a ProKey use Tools > Raw Data View and find TaxiwayParking under the Airport in the Tree

The issue will be dealing with some things like index number. Heading is also important otherwise they will all point North. Also you will need to link them up to the taxiway network with Parking Links.

 

[benclark]

Wow thanks guys, XML should work great. Heading is a minor thing that I can sort once the gates are connected and I start adding in parking assignments as I'll just be able to select banks of them which are all facing the same way. Just being able to add in the 246 parking spots of LTFM in one quick "easy" step is going to save literally hours of time.

Going to explore this shortly, index number shouldn't be took much of an issue right now as I'm just starting out so all I've got in it so far are the four runways and I've set up a spreadsheet which automatically converts the GPS coords from their format in the AIP to decimal coords.

One final question, when closing runways for takeoff or landing should I choose No or False? And does P3Dv4 still ignore how you close runways for Landing/Takeoff like FS9/FSX did or would it work here given that all four runways are parallel?

 

[benclark]

Ok so I added a single extra gate to the XML file, tried importing it, ADE tells me the current airport isn't saved, I choose no and absolutely nothing loads. I tried deleting the runways expecting the XML file to replace them and that didn't work either. I did try adding all the gates at once but that just threw up a number of errors. Any ideas?

 

[benclark]

One more update before I go to bed, managed to Open Airport from XML....eventually. It kept throwing me an error and in the end I had to copy this part

pushBack="BOTH"/>

from the two ADE generated XML entries and replace all the other's on the gates I'd entered. Turned out I wasn't using a capital B. Now I've realised I can literally make a list of entries like this

<TaxiwayParking index="25" lat="41.257211" lon="28.737558" heading="0" radius="18.0M" type="GATE_SMALL" name= "GATE_A" number="11" pushBack="BOTH"/>

and get them in nice and fast, the areas between quotations will be empty cells in my spreadsheet to literally insert the data, copy it out to Notepad, remove all the "tabs" and save in the XML file, this should be easy now. Not sure why I can't import the data thought to an existing file.

 

[tgibson]

Did you try saying yes to saving the airport first?

 

[benclark]

Did you try saying yes to saving the airport first?

Yup, did try both ways, doesn't make a difference, for some reason it simply won't import the XML data, fixing the capital B issue solved the latter half of that first post. Right now it's working and making the gates but I have to make a new airport from the XML. Not the end of the world though, once the gates are in they're in and I doubt I'll need to edit the XML again. If I do just be making a new airport and saving it over the old one again, just odd that it won't actually import the XML.

 

[benclark]

This is where I'm up to so far in a couple of hours. Far quicker than if I'd added each one manually, of course a fair few are going to end up getting deleted so that AI actually works properly but your advice has saved me hours of work, thanks guys! Hopefully I can get the rest of the parking spots in tonight.