Cumulus Support

It would be nice if you could have a checkbox in Cumulus to call a specific URL at a time interval like once a minute.

While you can use windows scheduler, or crontab on the website to do that, it is complicated to setup and explain to someone with little network and windows experience. Also a lot of web hosting does not either allow access to cron or limits the time granularity allowed (like minimal once every 10 min or once an hour).

The purpose of this would be to act as a scheduler on the remote website basically eliminating the need to use or have cron access on the website.

This would solve a lot of problems with dealing with making sure that certain functions take place on a timed basis on the website itself.

From that, a php/ASP or other script could be created on the website that provides a complete time sensitive series of events such as rolling over log files, updating logfiles, fetching satellite images, forecasts etc...

Yes - quite straightforward to add, and I can see how it would be useful. I'll fit it in when I can.

Cool

This would greatly help deal with a number of issues.

A single call to your website like: http://yourwebsite/schedule.php?c=1132311

could open up a whole new set of remote features.

Thec=1132311 is a code that you would configure in the schedule.php script to prevent actions from unexpected hits from other sources.

steve wrote:

TNETWeather wrote:A feature request was requested to have the ability added to Cumulus that would allow it to make a schedule call to a URL which would act as a trigger for this type of functionality without the need to rely on a cron capability of the host. But it has not been added.

I didn't see any point in me duplicating the functionality, as the Toolbox does it.

[Moved reply back into the topic where the original request was made.]

I was attempting to stay away from 3rd party tools or applications to provide the basic requirements of the system.

The Timed URL access feature is one of the missing pieces to the whole puzzle. With it, I can eliminate any need to bother supporting the various different ways crontabs work or don't work on potentially hundreds of different web hosts. I've seen a lot of weird configuration method requirements for a number of them.

I did look into a number of other small win32 apps that could provide that type of solution but for ease of support, the most logical place for it was inside of Cumulus itself since it already was sending the other data needed for the process to work (realtime.txt file).

In a minimal configuration, all the user needs is Cumulus, supported weather station and the wiki template and they would have a very complete solution. More advanced abilities are available which add more rich content like GRLevel3, other radar data and inclusion of many other weather resouces, but most of that is done on the server side rather than the users desktop.

I certainly could use Daj's toolbox, but then it basically has to be included in every installation and needs to be setup, configured and run properly. One more piece of the puzzle to break, stop running etc..

I have nothing against the tool at all... it is just a matter of support. If the template requires it, I then have to support it.

In any case, I will simply work around not having the feature. Still not sure that I want to go the direction of having to use the toolbox for every installation to work. I've started looking at what choices I have.

Work has started off the year like it ended last year with a bang, I'm having trouble keeping up.

No worries...