One of the most powerful features of the Showfx application is the ability to

drive animations from an external file via the Wizard editor. Using this feature,

you could (for example), create animations showing the current conditions from

your weather spotter network without having to enter any values (assuming your

spotters can access the file that would drive those animations).

Imagine creating a password protected Web interface that allows your spotters to edit their values within a spreadsheet, or other application that can export its data into what is called a “comma separated volume” (CSV). While we can’t become your IT department and help you create the Web interface, we can show you how to do the rest. 

Let’s say you have a simple Excel spreadsheet that looks like this (for a spotter network, it would likely be much bigger, but we’ll keep it short for simplicity).
Town / Neighborhood Low High
Current
Alpharetta
20
45
42
Buckhead
22
40
39
Roswell
19
42

40
       
You can save the spreadsheet into a CSV format by choosing File, Save As from the Excel menu. Then, in the “Save as type” drop down box, choose “CSV (MS-DOS)”. Give the file a name such as “spotters.txt”.

Once you do that, you’ll have a simple text file that will look like this…

Town / Neighborhood,Low,High,Current
Alpharetta,20,45,42
Buckhead,22,40,39
Roswell,19,42,40

You’ll need to get this file into your Showfx system, usually via a secure ftp mechanism. You’ll want to discuss with your IT group how this can be accomplished, and also how it might be automatically saved and transferred at set times during the day (e.g. ½ hour before your normal presentation time). It’s the automation that makes this whole procedure truly useful. For the purposes of this example, we’ll assume that the file has been copied to /wxdisk/wxws/spotters.txt on the Showfx system.

To use this information automatically within Showfx, follow these steps. Note: You may be able to skip the first few steps (1-6) if you’ve already got a spotter scene setup and wizarded for manual input of the values by you:

1.Open an existing scene, or create a new one with whatever background, or earth you normally use for your spotter reports.

2.If necessary, add place names, or manually add in the names of the spotter locations in the font, color, and other attributes of your choice, and place them on the map in the correct locations.

3.Add a text object for the spotter value, set the text for some arbitrary numeric value, and adjust this for font, color, etc. Don’t worry about the value for this object yet – it will be replaced later.

4.Place this object at one of the spotter locations (presumably underneath, or above the town name).

5.“Copy-drop” the object from #4 above, and re-position the new object at another spotter location. Repeat this step for however many spotter locations you desire.

6.Once all the spotter values are in place (albeit with the wrong values), you can begin to set them up to use information from the text file.

7.Click on any one of the spotter values, then click on Wizard, Wizard Maker, then Selected Object.

8.In the resulting menu, click on the “Make / Revise” button in the “String” field at the top of the menu.

9.Click on the button to the right of the “Prompt Type” field, and select “Load From File”.

10.For the “Prompt Label” field, type in the name of the town that corresponds to the currently selected
spotter object (e.g. “Alpharetta”).

11.Set the priority level to 1, and ignore the group setting.

12.Click OK – a new window will open.

13.Click on the “Select…” button, and navigate to the location where your text file resides (e.g. /wxdisk/wxws/spotters.txt).

14.Next to the town name (the prompt field), enter the town name again, exactly as it appears in the text file (in our example, we would enter “Alpharetta”).

15.In the box directly below the prompt field (“Alpharetta”), enter the column number after the town name where the value you need can be found in the text file. In this example, since we want current conditions, and that value can be found in the third column after the town name, we would enter a 3 in the box. If you’ve performed the steps above correctly, after pressing the Enter key, you should see the value from the text file appear in the Showfx scene at the location you are editing.

16.Repeat steps 7-15 above for each of the spotter values.

17.Save the scene.

18.The next time you open and render the scene, the system will use whatever values it finds in the text file that is being referenced by the Wizard. Again, you’ll want to experiment with ways to automate this process, including setting the scene to be rendered automatically via the Showfx scheduler.

These steps can be used for any number of Showfx animations, using any number of parameters. Some other examples of the types of animations that could be built include…

• A series of scenes that take input from you via a spreadsheet to construct forecast pages for several parts of your DMA (saves you the time of opening and editing each Showfx scene and Wizard). The data could be projected temperatures, rainfall or snowfall amounts, etc.

• An extended outlook page

• An almanac page that references average highs, lows, sunrise and sunset times, etc.

• Many others – If you can dream it up, it can probably be done!