[Dxbase] Another few wishes for the list

Wed Dec 20 18:25:44 EST 2006

Forgot these few wishes that were buried in my notebook:
29) An "Unknown Country" spot (usually either a bust or someone 
getting cute with the cluster) should NOT generate an alert! I 
sincerely doubt anything ever alerted this way has ever been worth 
alerting and passing along to the DX Info window. These should just 
either be overlooked entirely or get sent to the announcement pane.
30) Speaking of the Messages tab, may we please have a context-menu 
selection there to remove messages, either individually or all (just 
as you can do with spots and entries to the DX Info window)?
31) Also speaking of the messages tab, and this is a biggie, how 
about either full copy/paste capability or better still, clickable 
URLs (for example, an/full VU7 logs at 
http://arsi.info/vu7/onlinelog.shtml). Any string starting www. or 
http:// should automatically do this.
32) When you have a report or other dialog or menu up on-screen, why 
is the UTC clock frozen?
33) Another pet peeve of mine: in User Options (and others, too). 
When you make a change or access a tab within that box, and you close 
the box, upon re-opening it you should be returned to the most 
recently-used tab. For example, if I'm setting up my rotor control, I 
make the desired change, say OK, thus closing the Options box. If I 
then need to go back in and change something in the rotor tab I have 
to re-navigate to it. This gets old fast.
Finally, I gave some thought to yesterday's suggestion number 5 (DXCC 
award submission). The way it is now, it's too easy to do a 
"practice" DXCC submission, say YES to that Big Question, and all of 
a sudden, you're scuttled -- DX Base then assumes you've just sent a 
batch-o-cards off to the League, and further assumes they've all been 
accepted. Here's a better way for the DXCC submission part to work, I think:
When you access Output-Awards-DXCC, and click compute you get the 
same results you get now (please make the compute button 
re-pressable!). As it stands now, at the end of the computation, you 
get The Question That You Must Answer Correctly And Not Have A Second 
Chance At If You Make A Mistake (Do you want to set the award field 
in the QSO Log to credited AND clear the Select field for all QSOs 
used in this award form? Y/N).
What I propose is that, instead, delete this choice and just bring up 
the forms, etc. More often than not, you do this just to "see where 
you stand" or to do a sample/test, etc. After you close the crystal 
report forms (Front Sheet, QSO form, Worksheet), you should have a 
choice to MAKE THIS AN ACTUAL DXCC SUBMISSION or CLOSE, with CLOSE 
being the default. If you choose to make this an actual submission, 
all the entries you send to the League should be in a "pending" state 
until you get your paperwork back from Newington. When that happens, 
you should then be able to go into AWARDS-DXCC again, bring up the 
pending submission and either ACCEPT ALL or mark certain QSOs as 
not-accepted. Once you do that, THEN the marked QSO records should be 
unmarked and the QSOs shown as credited for DXCC. Finally, DX Base 
should keep track of all the submissions by date, and be able to 
re-print them on-demand later on if desired.
Cheers,
Peter,
W2IRT 