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Rtegroups

Name:
rtegroups - A utility to automatically create ADAPS groups from a Districts real-time sites

Information:

ADAPS groups are a powerful tool for use in performing functions in ADAPS. Once common group that many users maintain is a group of all of the real-time sites in their District. In particular, a group of District real-time sites is useful for some of the scripts on this web site, such as Quickplot or RT.Editor. However, maintenance of a real-time group can be problematic because the group must be hand edited with every addition or deletion of a real-time station. This is especially the case when several different users have the same group, as each must be maintained separately or the new version must be copied between users with every change.

This script automatically creates groups from the real-time sites maintained by NWISWeb. The groups are specific to certain parameter codes, can be created for multiple users, and can be filtered by District (useful where multiple Districts share the same NWIS host.)

The information regarding the groups to create is pulled from a control file listing the group names, pcodes, and user ids.
The format of each line in the control file is:

group_name / pcode1 [pcode2 ...] / district_code user1 [user2 ...]

where the two slashes (required) separate the three categories.

If the word "ALL" or "All" or "all" instead of a parameter code, the group will be created with all real-time parameters.

For example, the line in the control file

stage / 00065 / 19 tom dick harry

will create a group called 'stage' under users 'tom' 'dick' and 'harry' containing all the real-time stage site/DDs for District 19. For the majority of users that only have one District on their NWIS host, using a district code of 0 (zero) will eliminate the district code screening and make the script run faster.

To install this script, simply download, put the script in any directory on your NWIS host, and make the script file executable (chmod +x filename). Then type the name of the script. The name of the control file can be passed to the script as an argument, or if it is missing it will be prompted for.

This script can be run by hand, or it could be put into a cron job to execute on a regular schedule to ensure that your groups as always up to date.

Script Language:
sh

Requirements:

Original Author(s): Joe Nielsen, OSW and Ed Fischer, Iowa District

Note the original author is noted on this page for the purposes of giving credit only. Please address questions/comments to OSW (GS-W OSW Scripts@usgs.gov).

Known Problems/Limitations/Need Improvements:

• Currently hard coded to database 01. You can easily modify the script to access other databases, however.
• Currently when a new version of NWIS is loaded the ownership and permission of ADAPS groups are reset. When this occurs it will break this script's ability to overwrite existing groups for any users other than the user running the script. The easiest fix to this is probably to have each user delete the existing groups prior to rerunning the script. Once the old groups are deleted, the script will recreate them with the proper permissions (until the next release of NWIS). It is possible that in future releases of NWIS the resetting of permissions within the groups directory will be made an optional installation step, in which case you may not run into this problem.

Scripts:

Version 1.3: (posted 08/16/05)
- updated for new NWIS 4.5 (works with 4.4 too)
- added "all" option
rtegroups download (Zip file = 3.0K)