19990706: mcidasos2 @stc

>From: address@hidden
>Organization: St. Cloud State
>Keywords: 199907062137.PAA23921

Hi Alan-

>Our offices are currently having a new floor installed;
>that is my excuse for not knowing the following:

No that's an original excuse. ;-)

>AS of 1 July, the UNIDATAS file has gone away, or at 
>least is not available to our os2 machines.  The result
>is that undecoded metars are no longer available to the
>os2 terminals.  Other things seem to work ok, and as you
>know, the os2 machines mount the disk of a terminal running
>MCIDASX.  The product that fails is part of the weather text
>submenu, listing udecoded reports for a state.  

You can access the raw reports if you are running XCD on the
ingester and have set up the appropriate ADDE data locations on
your OS/2 system.  Use the SFCRPT command to access the
raw observation text.  SFCRPT is more powerful because you 
can access more than just the latest hour's data - you can 
go back 36 or more hours.

If you want to access them from the menu, you will have to
edit the file TEXTLIST.MCB in the \mcidas\data directory of
your OS/2 system.  At about line 133, add the following line:

      IF T$ = "SA" KEYIN "SFCRPT ";K$;" TWIN=3 DEV=CNN":GOTO 50 

right after the line:

      IF MID$(T$,1,1) <> "S" GOTO 45 

This will only allow you to access the current hour's data. 

>Running MCIDASX probably would not result in this problem, but
>we have most of our terminals still on os2 with the conversion
>process extending across the summer.  What can I do about it?

Make the change above and let us know if you have any problems.
You need to make sure that you have the location of RTWXTEXT set
to access data from your server.  Run:

DATALOC

and make sure it lists RTWXTEXT as pointing to your remote ADDE
server.  If it doesn't, run:

DATALOC ADD RTWXTEXT WALDO.STCLOUDSTATE.EDU

I just pointed my OS/2 system to waldo after making the change and it
works fine.  Making this change should not affect your other data
access if you are still getting the other data for your OS/2 machines 
from hobbes.

Don Murray