Don't publish empty data

[tkurki]

A large portion of my Data Browser looks like this:

[htool]

To allow displaying the channel number and other info I'm sending the sorted info to SignalK paths.
When the next list is shorter, as far as I know there's no way to delete an old entry.
So as a workaround, I'm overwriting with blank.
What would be a better way to do this?

[tkurki]

It sounds like what is happening is that you are publishing a new list. For that operation / use case it would be much simpler if the whole list would be a single value, an array, for a single path vhfdata.nearest.

[htool]

Correct. I started with that. But if someone wants to use a path to 'see' a certain nearby channel, that reader would need to understand the whole format. That's why I started adding the values in a seperate path.

Ideally I'd be able to update existing paths and delete ones I know are no longer relevant. Delete/invalidate.
That would give me the ability to have both worlds without side effects. I could make the plugin allow you to choose which one the users wants to publish.

[tkurki]

I don't see how that would actually work. Here a certain "path" is arbitrary - now the channel I am interested is 3rd on the list, but as I maneuver in a moment it may be 2nd or 4th or something else.

I think the static part of this data should be modeled as resources, retrievable via the resources api, and the updates/delta data would be just the relative data: resource id, distance & bearing (ouch I just noticed bearing and bearingRad - everything in SK should use radians!).

I can help with the implementation.

[htool]

Agreed on the resource model approach. That was the plan all along, but to first get something up and running to understand better the use cases. Quite some things changed since the start around assumptions.
E.g. I started with a channel numeric. Then learned there are countries using '5a'. And later found that certain stations in Denmark have 3 channels. 16, 13 or 12.

Now that the format is at least more stable it can move to a proper place. I haven't done any resource provider yet.

Currently time is somewhat limited, but after the sail season I can put time in again to get this migrated over the winter period all ready in time for next season.