Stabilizing the cardinal direction nomenclature in CTA Bus Tracker API

[ctaweb]

Hello, developers. 

 

As a few of you have noted, there recently has been some differences in how cardinal directions in the CTA Bus Tracker API are expressed.

 

Historically, the API has given directions in the format "North Bound" or "East Bound", etc. While, perhaps, of questionable stylistic virtue—this is how the system presented info since it was first implemented and has, largely, been left the same.

 

Recently, a back-end change was implemented in the software that powers all this (it is made by a third party) and also how the data are imported, and it changed the directions to the "Northbound" or "Eastbound" way of representing direction (it lost the space and the second capital letter). Now, if you don't depend on this programmatically, use a method to trim spaces out of the result for this field and ignore case, or only grab the first character of the string, then you've probably never noticed a change.

 

As a result of this change, each time we have a new schedule loaded into the CTA Bus Tracker system, it automatically changes to these and, at minimum, takes our vendor some amount of time to manually run some processes to change the data back.

 

So here are some things to know: 

1. It is currently back at the historical way, in case this matters to you. While not a change to the API, nor is anything different in the schema, a usually-predicable set of values here has sometimes been different than it used to be.
    
2. We're sorry this nomenclature changed unexpectedly. We understand that if you've hard-coded your app to expect only the historical possibilities, this can be a problem, so we want to stabilize the situation and try to avoid any avoidable changes, even if not necessarily defined in our docs or the schema.
    
3. Choosing to permanently remove the space/camelcasing will stabilize the info and make the presentation of this info better match accepted, stylistic norms for expressing cardinal direction, and finally stabilize (rather than retroactively reverting it with each new schedule that gets implemented—a necessity to maintain the status quo, unfortunately), both in the API and in our front-end.

Beginning Sunday, June 23, 2013 (our next major schedule data update), in all API endpoints where direction is represented, the API will begin showing "Northbound", "Southbound", "Eastbound" and "Westbound" for direction, and will continue to do so from that point forward.

 

We are working to avoid quirks in the meantime, and can tell you that, through June 22, it should stay in the current way with the space and current capital "B".

 

The documentation and schema remain unchanged as this nomenclature matter has nothing to do with either.

  

Please ready your apps accordingly and let us know if you have any questions. And, of course, thanks for your patience.

 

-TC/ctaweb