Bushwalk Inventory System Beta Testing

[Son of a Beach]

The new Bushwalk Inventory System is now up and running and anyone is welcome to try it out (although it is currently just for beta-testing). The principal purposes of this system are two-fold:

1. To help prevent forgetting required items when preparing and packing for bushwalks. This is done with simple, re-usable lists of items (ie, 'inventories')
2. To help make sure the correct amounts/numbers of items are calculated when preparing and packing for bushwalks (including each cooking ingredient, stove fuel, toilet paper, etc). This is done by making it trivially easy to create meal plans, and from those meal plans automatically calculate how much of each ingredient and stove fuel is required. Calculations can also be entered for items in the re-usable inventory item lists to automatically determine how much of each item is required according to the number of days and/or number of people in the walking part (eg, for toilet paper).

If you are interested in seeing or trying it out, go to: http://bushwalk.com/inventory/
(or Bushwalk Australia users can go to: http://bushwalkaustralia.com/inventory/ ).

NB: Please do not ask for feature additions at this time. Although I would like to improve the feature set as time goes by, for now I merely want to refine what it does and get that right for starters.

There's a little bit of setting up for each user to make it really useful, but the system is designed to automatically set you up with defaults enough to make it immediately useful. To make it really suited to your needs, you'll need to add ingredients, add meals, add items, customise your inventory. Once all this is done, future use of the system is trivially easy.

Here's some of the features of the system, as taken from the system's User Guide:

• Multiple custom inventories for each person (ie, list of gear to take on walks)
• Multiple walks for each inventory
• Automatic generation of meal plans for each walk based on custom preferences for each meal of the day
• Customisable meal plans
• Automatic generation of shopping list for consumables (food and fuel) for each meal plan
• Caters for multiple people on each walk, and meal plans can include different meals for different people
• Automatically calculates amounts/numbers of each item required for each walk based on number of people and number of days using custom calculations for each item
• Automatically excludes overnight gear from walks of less than 2 days duration based on custom calculations for those items
• Automatically calculates the base pack weight for each inventory
• ...plus much more

Check out the system's User Guide for more information and for help with using the system (or post here if it's not clear enough in the manual).

I expect some bugs, so please be kind. I have tested every feature, but as I find bugs, and fix them, this has the possibility of creating new bugs which I may not yet have found.

Anyhow, let me know what you think.

Note that I will delete bug reports from this topic as the bugs are fixed (to keep the topic focussed on current issues), but if you feel a bug is still occurring after the report has been deleted, please feel free to re-post.

[Son of a Beach]

I've made my own 'Standard' inventory public for demonstration purposes:

• 'Standard' inventory

And also written up 2 of my past walks as accurately as I can remember their meal plans off the top of my head for demonstration purposes:

• An example multi-day walk
• An example day walk

Note that both of these walks use the same inventory (ie, 'standard'). However, multi-day walk includes items that are not listed for the day walk. This is achieved by using a calculation for some of the items in the inventory. Any calculation that results in a 0 (zero) will not be displayed. So items that are only used for multi-day walks use a calculation based on the number of days, and result in 0 for any walks with days less than zero.

See the user manual for further information on using calculations (eg, to calculate how many rolls of toilet paper to take for multi-person/multi-day walks).

[Son of a Beach]

The following improvements have just been made to the system:

• Stove Fuel is no longer added as an ingredient for each menu item, but is it's own separate entity for each menu item. (Doing it as an ingredient was a bad design choice left over from trying to convert my original spreadsheet into a database, and neglecting the fact that I'm no longer limited by the deficiencies of using a spreadsheet).
• Food and Fuel amounts are now correct for walks/meals that include more than one person (I had neglected to multiply each amount by the number of people partaking in each meal - doh!).
• Amounts are now shown in both the small per-meal units in brackets, as well as in the large totals unit (where they are different).
• Fuel is always displayed at the top of the consumables list, instead of in amongst the food items.
• In the meal plan, meals that use stove fuel have an asterisk next to them. This makes it easy to make sure that all the required fuel is being accounted for (or to avoid meals that use fuel if you're into that sort of thing).

[Son of a Beach]

...and, warnings are now displayed in the meal plan if there are any 'vital meals' (breakfast, lunch, or dinner) with the incorrect total number of persons (if different people are eating different menu items on the same day for the same meal, it adds those people together correctly).

This avoids problems with changing the number of people on a walk, but forgetting to change the number of people for each meal, and avoids problems where different people are eating different menu items for the same meal, but you might forget to override the default number of people for the different meals you added (the default for each meal, is the number of people on the walk).

EDIT: And fixed a bug with one of the additions in the previous post where it would display stove fuel in the list of consumables even if the total amount required was zero.

PPS: Warnings are also displayed for any meal type that is used, but not for up to two days less than the total number of days (ie, for a 5 day walk, where lunch is only included for 2 or fewer days). The idea being that you may not need to pack lunch (or any meal) for the first and/or last day if you're having a late start on the first day, or an early finish on the last day.

[Son of a Beach]

The walk page (in view mode) now includes a 'Printable View' button and a 'Print Now' button, which will display (and with the second button, will print) a version of the walk page which is better suited to printing.

The 'printable' view excludes the page headers and has no background colours, and is generally cleaner for printing and doesn't waste too much toner.

[Son of a Beach]

A significant change has been made to the way meals and ingredients are handled to simplify things for meals where it is not necessary to specify a list of ingredients.

Any menu item which has no ingredients at all, will now appear in the consumables list (ie, food & fuel shopping list) under the name of the menu item, with the correct amount of 'serves' depending on how many people are eating it, how often.

This may suit people who don't want to fiddle around creating complex lists of ingredients for every menu item, while still allowing others to do so. It also allows people to mix and match the two methods in the same meal plan and still end up with a meaningful list of consumables that should ensure nothing gets left out when packing for the walk.

Eg, the 'Unspecified Dinner' menu item now has no ingredients (instead of the generic 'unspecified dinner' ingredient), and instead of having its ingredients (now nothing) listed in the consumables list, it is listed there under its own name as, for example: 'Unspecified Dinner 3 serves'.

Specifying a list of ingredients is very useful for some meals, and especially for meals that will be mixed/cooked at the time of eating, or where the same ingredients are shared for multiple meals. For example, sugar and milk powder may be used for tea (the drink) as well as for porridge, or for some desserts - in this case the amount of milk powder required will be automatically calculated, and shown on the list just once. Similarly, cheese or salami may be used for several lunches, but should only be displayed on the consumables list once each.

However, for any meal that is both purchased and packed as a single item, it is now not necessary to have any ingredients for it in the system (eg, 'Freeze Dried Meal').

[johnw]

Nik,
1. While logged in to BWT I clicked on the BWT Inventory System URL.
2. A blank page displayed containing the following:

Code: Select all

Request Failed
ERROR: Failed to delete unused igredients in cleanup.

1054 -> Unknown column 'creation_date' in 'where clause'

Click Here to Go Back to the Previous Page

1. I then tried it clicking the BWA URL from BWT.
2. It first prompted for BWA login.
3. On login it displayed the same error as above (as expected).

[Son of a Beach]

Thanks John. Fixed now.

(I had been updating the database cleanup routine to delete menu items that were created and never named or used within 3 days, but I had neglected to create a 'creation_date' field... doh!).

[Son of a Beach]

I think I've finally reached feature parity with my original 'Bushwalking Inventory' spreadsheet that this system was inspired by (plus weight tallies which were never on the spreadsheet). Phew! That's the original goal completed - Ie, make the functionality of the spreadsheet available to other people in such a way that menu items can be shared (ie, I'm always looking for more cooking ideas, and I bet some other people are too).

If no more significant bugs are found within the next few days, I might put it into production (which just means placing some more prominent links to it elsewhere on the site, and taking more care not to break the live system while making changes).

I know this sort of thing is not going to be of use to those bushwalkers who are already good at organising and packing all their gear and organising exactly the right amount of each type of food, and stove fuel, but it sure is the ideal tool for me. So I hope it ends up being useful for a few others too.

It can also be useful for people comparing their gear lists (for weight, or for any other reasons). Having two lists in a uniform format makes them much easier to compare.

Features that might make still be done soon could be:

• Comparison report on two different inventories. Ie, what stuff does somebody take that I don't, or do I take that they don't, and difference in weight between each item that both people take, and difference in total weight.
• Ability to copy other people's inventories and menu items (or duplicate your own).

In the mean time, keep reporting bugs here if you find any more problems.

Thanks to all those who've helped track down problems thus far - especially to johnw for the effort put into resolving some tricky bugs.

[sthughes]

I would be cool to be able to customise an inventory to a particular walk (like just take out a couple of things or add a couple to your main inventory. Not sure if this easy to do of course and really if you make it possible to basically copy an inventory when creating a new one then that will suffice. Just an idea though. So far it seems pretty good - keep up the good work

[Son of a Beach]

I would be cool to be able to customise an inventory to a particular walk (like just take out a couple of things or add a couple to your main inventory. Not sure if this easy to do of course and really if you make it possible to basically copy an inventory when creating a new one then that will suffice. Just an idea though. So far it seems pretty good - keep up the good work

Well, the duplication of inventories is now working.

You have to view the inventory (click on the name of the inventory in the main 'Inventories & Walks' page), then click the 'Copy Inventory' button. This makes it trivially simple to make additional inventories that are just marginally different to each other (ie, copy one, then edit it and make a few changes to the new one).

It also makes it possible to copy other people's inventories, if they make them public and send you the URL to their inventories.

Note that inventories should not be made too walk-specific (as that's what the 'walk' feature is for), otherwise you would lose the re-usability of the inventory (the whole point of the system is that you should only have to create your inventories once - or at least very rarely - and then re-use your existing inventorie(s) for all walks). But does make sense for some people to have a few inventories for different types of walks/seasons/regions.

For myself, I've only got one inventory, and I don't think I need any others. The calculations feature means that it automatically excludes overnight items for day walks, and I use the 'optional' checkbox for items that I only want on some walks and not others. But of course other people do things differently to me.

[sthughes]

Yeah the only thing with the 'Optional' box is that when you make up a 'Walk' you can't choose to leave out the optional stuff - I almost never take all of it with me. Therefore it still counts all optional items in the total weight which if you have lots of optional stuff (of which you only carry a couple of bits at a time) then you end up with a huge weight even though you won't be carrying all that. Of course this is only an issue to us gram counting tragics

[Son of a Beach]

Ah yes, I see what you mean. That makes good sense. It hadn't occurred to me, as I almost never weigh my gear (I've weighed my total pack weight before very long walks twice, just for curiosity, and that's it).

So the gram counters probably don't want to include anything as 'optional', and make up several inventories to suit specific types of walks. That makes sense now that I think about it.

[Son of a Beach]

Note that the system is no effectively 'in production', having an announcement topic, and a permanent blurb with link, in the equipment forum (see pink section at top of equipment forum pages). Of course more bugs may yet be found, and other improvements made over time, but any further discussion can now go into the new announcement topic.