CXA001

Not sure what this has to do with the the topic. PM it instead.

Agreed it has been a little quieter than usual, but with VATSIM's annual Cross the Pond event this weekend, the skies are sure to get busy.

Opening Day is the day on which professional baseball leagues begin their regular season. For Major League Baseball and most of the minor leagues, this day falls during the first week of April. For baseball fans, Opening Day serves as a symbol of rebirth; writer Thomas Boswell once penned a book titled, Why Time Begins on Opening Day. Many feel that the occasion represents newness or a chance to forget last season in that the 30 major league clubs and their millions of fans begin with 0-0 records. Canadian Xpress would like to invite all pilots to join us on Saturday, April 14th, 2012 at 20h00edt (24h00z) for our April 2012 Fly-In where we will visit some famous cities related to Baseball history. Departing from Chicago Midway (KMDW), home of the Cubs and White Socks, we will fly south to Louisville (KSDF), home of the famous Hillerich & Bradsby Company which produces the famous Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Then we head east to Washington (KDCA), home of the Nationals, which is the franchise moved from the defunct Montreal Expos. Let’s hope for the River Visual Runway 19 Approach to add to the challenge! This is an open invitation to all pilots no matter what your flying experience to attend this Canadian Xpress sponsored event that will be flown on the VATSIM network. More information regarding this event including operational details, charts, optional add-on scenery and the Canadian Xpress SB Model Set can be viewed by visiting www.CanadianXpress.ca or by directly downloading our Fly-In document here. See you all on Saturday the 14th!

Spring is upon the eastern seaboard and it is time to start thinking about opening up those summer homes & cottages. Now of course, we are not talking about our own. We are referring to those of the rich and famous. The contractors, property managers along with real estate agents and their clients have charted Canadian Xpress® to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island. This month your job is to fly our clients round trip from Teterboro Airport to Martha’s Vineyard and then a round trip from Teterboro to Nantucket for a total of 4 flights to complete this challenge. Join Canadian Xpress® today in order to participate as there are some great prizes to be won. First Place: 25 bonus flight hours (enables you to climb the ranks faster in order to fly larger, more challenging aircraft) and the Monthly Challenge Award added to his/her name in the Pilot Roster: In addition, any Download product from: http://www.aerosoft.com/ Second Place: 15 bonus flight hours (enables you to climb the ranks faster in order to fly larger, more challenging aircraft); Third Place: 10 bonus flight hours (enables you to climb the ranks faster in order to fly larger, more challenging aircraft) The March 2012 Challenge is open to all Canadian Xpress® pilots from March 2nd until March 28th, 2012 so join Canadian Xpress® today by visiting http://CanadianXpress.ca . *Canadian Xpress® accepts 50% of your VATSIM, IVAO or other virtual airline hours with no limits.

A Snowbird is a term used to describe Canadian citizens who enjoy spending the winter months of the year in warmer climates. It is well known fact that a great contingency of Canadian citizens migrate to Florida in the winter months and when they first arrive are usually pale, this why they are called Snowbirds. Canadian Xpress would like to invite all pilots to join us on Saturday, March 17th, 2012 at 09h00est (14h00z) for our March 2012 Fly-In where we will transport the Snowbirds back up home. Departing from the Sarasota Bradenton International (KSRQ), we will bring back our passengers to Toronto Pearson International (CYYZ). This is an open invitation to all pilots no matter what your flying experience to attend this Canadian Xpress® sponsored event that will be flown on the VATSIM network. More information regarding this event including operational details, charts, optional add-on scenery and the Canadian Xpress SB Model Set can be viewed by visiting www.CanadianXpress.ca or by directly downloading our Fly-In document here. See you all on Saturday the 17th!

There have been a few VAs hit also in the last week or so. Glad to see things are slowly coming back.

In a normal web page, all the symbols are in superscript, so it is much easier to read than in a forum where this functionality is not possible. We definately keep that in mind for future posts. Thanks for the feeback Tom.

Wow! So critical!

Yes, as well as several other variations on the name Canadian Xpress including Canadian Express.

Canadian Xpress® would like to invite all pilots to join us on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 20h30est (Sunday February 19th 01h30z) for our February 2012 Fly-In where we will fly from Italy direct to Venice over the most famous Italian cities; Naples, Rome and Florence. Departing from Palermo (LICJ) in Sicily, we will fly to Venice Marco Polo International (LIPZ) for the Venice Carnival. We will then take a gondola and cross the Canal Grande to Venice S. Nicolò (LIPV) where we will depart and fly over the Dolomites to Bolzano (LIPB), a nice town in South Tirol. The Carnival of Venice is one of the most famous carnivals in the world and has very ancient origins dating back to the end of 11th century. At the age of the Serenissima the carnival began on December 26 and ended during mardi gras but in some years, the carnival lasted 180 days. The Dolomites are a mountain range located in north-east of Italy and they are famous for skiing in the winter months and climbing, hiking, base jumping, paragliding and hand gliding. In other words, it is a tourist Mecca. This is an open invitation to all pilots no matter what your flying experience to attend this Canadian Xpress® sponsored event that will be flown on the VATSIM network. More information regarding this event including operational details, charts, optional add-on scenery and the Canadian Xpress® SB Model Set can be viewed by visiting www.CanadianXpress.ca or by directly downloading our Fly-In document here. See you all on Saturday the 18th!

That is not what I meant. Of course you can take any graphic and save it. I am referring to a VA Central Graphic that is dynamic that shows your VA rating with VA Central.

Hi all, I have seen a couple of VA web sites that have a VA Central graphic along with their rating. Where can I get this graphic / documentation on how to set this up on our web site? Thanks in advance,

Hi all, In the process of setting up our web site to automatically send a pirep, when a pilot submits his flight on our web site. For the most part, it seems to be working as I do receive a 200SuccessUpdated 1 of 1 message however, I am also getting the following: An Error Was Encountered Error Triggered: [2] fwrite() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given Line 80 in file /var/www/phpvms/api/core/functions.php An Error Was Encountered Error Triggered: [2] mysql_fetch_object(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource Line 237 in file /var/www/phpvms/api/models/update_model.php An Error Was Encountered Error Triggered: [2] mysql_num_rows() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given Line 266 in file /var/www/phpvms/api/models/update_model.php Any idea on what these error messages mean? Thanks in advance,

We were wondering on what vaCentral's position is on having a VA send pireps that do not include the Pilot's Name? We would like to send our pireps, except that our current privacy policy forbids us from using the pilot's name. Would it be possible just to use the pilot's callsign as his name instead of his real name? If not, we will have to look and see if we can change our privacy policy. Thanks in advance,

Thanks for your help. By understanding the logic, I was able to successfully create the necessary code to send our basic stats to vaCentral. For anyone else that is using ASP.NET here is the code that we used to successfully update our VA info. It is written in VB.net but you can easily convert it to C# with the following converter: http://www.developerfusion.com/tools/convert/vb-to-csharp/ How you want to trigger the event is up to you. We simply created a page with a Send Stats button that we will use to send the updated stats, a couple times a day. At the top of your page, you will to define the following imports: Imports System Imports System.IO Imports System.Net Imports System.Text In the sub that triggers the Send Stats event whether it be a button.click or whatever else: ' Stats that you need to retreive from your database and populate into these variables. Dim stringTotalHours as integer 'Total VA hours. Dim stringTotalFlights as integer 'Total VA flights. Dim stringTotalPilots As integer 'Total VA pilots. ' Create a request using a URL that can receive a post. Dim SendVAStats As WebRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://api.vacentral.net/update") SendVAStats.Proxy = WebRequest.GetSystemWebProxy() SendVAStats.Proxy.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials ' Set the Method property of the request to POST. SendVAStats.Method = "POST" ' Create POST data and convert it to a byte array. Dim stringVAStats As String = "<?xml version=""1.0""?> <vacentral> <siteurl>Your VA URL</siteurl> <apikey>Your API Key</apikey> <version> </version> <debug> </debug> <method>update_vainfo</method> <pilotcount>" & stringTotalPilots & "</pilotcount> <totalhours>" & stringTotalHours & "</totalhours> <totalflights>" & stringTotalFlights & "</totalflights> <totalschedules> </totalschedules> <expenses>0</expenses> <expensescost> </expensescost> <livefuel>0</livefuel> </vacentral>" Dim byteArray As Byte() = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringVAStats) ' Set the ContentType property of the WebRequest. SendVAStats.ContentType = "text/xml" ' Set the ContentLength property of the WebRequest. SendVAStats.ContentLength = byteArray.Length ' Get the request stream. Dim dataStream As Stream = SendVAStats.GetRequestStream() ' Write the data to the request stream. dataStream.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length) ' Close the Stream object. dataStream.Close() ' Get the response. Dim response As WebResponse = SendVAStats.GetResponse() ' Display the status. Console.WriteLine(CType(response, HttpWebResponse).StatusDescription) ' Get the stream containing content returned by the server. dataStream = response.GetResponseStream() ' Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access. Dim reader As New StreamReader(dataStream) ' Read the content. Dim responseFromServer As String = reader.ReadToEnd() ' Display status in a label that is on your aspx page. LabelSendStatsStatus.Visible = True LabelSendStatsStatus.Text = (responseFromServer) ' Clean up the streams. reader.Close() dataStream.Close() response.Close() Hopefully, this will be of assistance to someone out there.

We need a little more information on how vaCentral receives this information. The home page of va Central says "or if you're using a custom system, you can implement your code to talk to vaCentral through XML." Does this mean the xml should be placed on our home page and vaCentral will query it once a week or do we need to send this information via an http query string or when visiting the api site and populate the web page with the XML file in order for vaCentral to read it? Our web site is written in asp.net and not php therefore I need to understand the process, so that we can write the code accordingly. Thanks in advance,

Will give that a try. Two links dead links: http://docs.phpvms.net/doku.php Also when registering it gives a link to download the User Guide. This also was a dead link. Regards,

Roger That!

Hi Joeri, So if we understand this correctly. In our case, we would just need to trigger the update_vainfo to send our total pilot count, total hours, total fights, etc. to send that data to vaCentral up to 3 times a day? Are these totals for the day or total to date? As we don't have any fixed routes, we do not need to use the update_schedules? What is the Receive URL that I need to send this data to? Sorry for all the questions, but as there doesn't seem to be any documentation available, we need to rely on your knowledge.

Hi all, We have been looking at vaCentral for quite sometime and finally opened an account and setup our VA. On the home page of vaCentral it says "you can implement your code to talk to vaCentral through XML." When registering, there was a link to a user guide, but it was a dead link and we have a couple of questions: 1. As we are not using phpVMS, but another automated system our pilots use for sending flight reports (currently FSAcars, but will be updating to our own inhouse system later this year), where do we need to place the XML code? 2. We do not have fixed routes. We have what is called a Free Flying Policy where pilots can fly any route that they like. How will this affect our ranking within vaCentral? We did search all the pages on the web site to try and find some documentation regarding all this, but didn't seem to find much. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks in advance,