20020722: McIDAS-X & XCD (cont.)

>From: "Fingerhut, William A" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Lyndon State
>Keywords: 200207191535.g6JFZa920941 McIDAS-X XCD REDIRECT

Bill,

>Are your feeling any better today? Hope you are.

Yes, I am well on the road to recovery.  Good thing 'cause I am out
of time before my workshop!

>I have been pouring over my xcd problem and going no where.
>I can't find anything wrong, but we know that something must
>be wrong.
>
>The machine is ingesting DDS, and the data monitors seem to
>be running. A ps -ef | grep ldm show the DM's.

This only means that startxcd.k is running and that the copy of
DECINFO.DAT in ~mcidas/workdata is setup to tell startxcd.k to
run the data monitors that you watn.

>I just ran: wxtlist.k APRO=RR5 AST=BTV
>and found this text bulletin on my machine.
>
>There are *.RAP and *.IDX files in the xcd data directory,
>but no *.IDT or *.RAT files.

This is bad.  It indicates a configuration problem.

>I looked at ~mcidas/workdata/XCDINST.LOG
>and, since BILDTEXT is supposed to create *.RAT (?), noticed
>BILDTEXT INIT SAOMETAR.RAP SAOMETAR.RAT 6500 4 C4  36  1 80 SAOMETAR X
>32
>BILDTEXT: No datatypes defined for decoder SAOMETAR
>BILDTEXT: M0buildidt: GetDecoderTypes return -2
>Input configuration now being built
>
>pointer file name=SAOMETAR.RAP   text file name SAOMETAR.RAT
>number of stations allowed in the file      6500
>number of stations currently in the file    -5
>number of reports per observation period    4
>number of words needed to define a station  1
>number of observation blocks per station    36
>number of hours between observation block   1
>number of bytes per observation line        80
>number of words in station information blk  1448
>number of words in observation blk          40
>maximum size of TXT file                    33554432
>starting lw address of first word of id     1024
>starting lw address of second word of id    1024
>starting lw address of station blocks       8192
>master station id table to use STNDB.CORE
>decoder used to define id table SAOMETAR
>padding SAOMETAR.RAP to word 9420192     with hex80s
>BILDTEXT: done
>
>Is the "no datatypes found" a clue?

Yes, this is definitely a clue.  Exactly what it is telling us I am
not positive of, however.  I would guess that the IDGROUP invocation
run from XCD.BAT did not run successfully.  IDGROUP creates GROUPS.DAT
and COUNTRY.DAT, both in the ~mcidas/workdata directory.
The comment in the online help for IDGROUP:

   IDGROUP is a utility for creating and editing groups of
   stations used with rapid text accessing applications.

indicates that this is probably at the root of the problem somehow.

All I can recommend is that you start the XCD configuration steps from
the beginning:

o stop the LDM
o delete GROUPS.DAT and COUNTRY.DAT
o make sure your REDIRECTions are correct
o define the McIDAS string XCDDATA
o delete the *.RAP files in the output directory
o make sure that SCHEMA can be found (use DMAP SCHEMA)
o run:
  BATCH XCD.BAT
  BATCH XCDDEC.BAT
o restart the LDM

I am willing to jump onto your system and take a quick look if you
like.  If you would like me to do this, I will need logins as 'ldm'
and 'mcidas'.

>I have no idea what to try now. Should I reinstall xcd?

I don't think a reinstallation is needed.  A reconfiguration seems to be
in order, however.

Tom