Wi-Flight is an automated flight data collection and monitoring system with web-based flight playback capability. Wi-Flight uses flight data recorders aboard aircraft that upload their data over the Internet.

GenAV Flight Office is a complete office management solution for flight schools.

This connector implements one-way integration between these two systems. Bookings for aircraft are downloaded from GenAV Flight Office and imported into Wi-Flight as reservations. Wi-Flight's normal matching between flights and reservations takes place so that when Wi-Flight flights are recorded and uploaded, they are associated with the corresponding Flight Office booking.

The connector is currently in early stages of development and is missing the key feature of enabling the system to offer web-based access to Wi-Flight flights to Flight Office users where the Wi-Flight flight and Flight Office booking have been associated together.

Currently the connector does not have the ability to run as a daemon and passively receive notifications from Flight Office concerning new, changed, or deleted bookings. Instead, the connector must run at regular intervals and probe for new bookings.

The more often the connector is run, the more promptly new or changed bookings will be imported to Wi-Flight, but running the connector too often will result in excessive network traffic between the connector and Flight Office, and excessive load on Flight Office. There is no communication between the connector and Wi-Flight if the connector is run and there are no new or changed bookings detected.

The connector should be run as a cron job (scheduled job) at the chosen interval.

The connector requires the following software to be installed:

• Python (version 2.7 tested)
• SQLAlchemy, Debian package python-sqlalchemy
• Any local database that is compatible with SQLAlchemy (MySQL tested)
• pywiflight
• PycURL, Debian package python-pycurl

After software is installed:

• (OPTIONAL) Create a dedicated user account for use by the connector. If no dedicated user account shall be used then choose which existing user account will run the connector.
• Create database schema and credentials (username and password) for the connector to access its local database. This is probably required for every database type except SQLite.
• Create a configuration file .genav_connector.dburi in the user's home directory containing a SQLAlchemy URL for database access. An example for MySQL is

mysql://username:password@localhost/database-name?charset=utf8

• Create the database tables (and test database access at the same time!) by running the script create_schema.

• Create directories genav_config and .genav_password in the user's home directory.

• For each organization whose bookings the connector will be responsible for importing, create a configuration file in ~/genav_config named after the company code (sCompCode), e.g. ~/genav_config/ABC123. The configuration file should contain something like this:

  user url http://flight-office-download-base-url-supplied-by-genav domain

• There should also be a file with the same name in ~/.genav_password with the Wi-Flight API password on one line.

• Create a cron job to run the pull_updates script at chosen intervals with a single command line argument: the company code (e.g. pull_updates ABC123)