22nd August 201722nd August 2017 by Mark Evans

Product Maintenance

At 14:30 UK time (09:30 ET, 06:30 PDT, 21:30 HKT) on Wednesday 23rd August there will be a small disruption to Fleets Analyzer while an upgrade is in progress.

Extent of the disruption

Starting at around 14:30, both the Quick Profile Search (QPS) and Quick Filter Search (QFS) will be unavailable, over the following 1hr, both the QFS and QPS will start to populate with values, by the end of the hour, both should be fully populated.

Figure 1. The Quick Profile Search (QPS) as seen on the homepage.

Figure 2. The Quick Filter Search (QFS) as seen on a search page.

Workarounds

Filters

Although the QFS will not be available, all the filter options will still be accessible from the Add Filter menu.

Figure 3. The Add Filter Menu, available on all search pages.

Profiles (aircraft and companies)

To view an aircraft profile, please use the Add Filter Menu, accessible from the Aircraft page, in the Age & Identification filter group, please enter the registration or serial number in the search fields. The aircraft will then appear in the results grid, where you will be able to click on the serial number and then view the profile.

Figure 4. Searching for specific aircraft via the Add Filter Menu (click to view full-size).

Why the disruption?

A typical faceted search engine would usually have 5-10 filter groups, with hundreds or even thousands of filter values. Fleets Analyzer has around 2 million filter values, this is the reason we introduced the QFS, it allows a user to search these 2 million filter values without having to navigate through a typical tree structure.

During this release, we’re adding Aircraft Family as a new filter option within the Aircraft Type hierarchy, because of this, all the 2 million filter options have to be reindexed so that they are searchable, and this process takes around 1hr.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience that this disruption may cause, we are investigating changing the search technology used in the QFS and QPS so that this type of disruption can be avoided in future.