New CI BioBase Upload Tool

The Contour Innovations team has released a new and incredibly efficient upload tool for all CI BioBase users.  The new tool boasts enhanced performance, multi-select upload and automated upgrades for future revisions from Contour Innovations.  The following post goes through the procedure for obtaining the new tool and outlines some of the key functionalities of the latest release of the CI BioBase Upload Tool.

Downloading the New Upload Tool

Getting the new tool is as easy as logging into www.cibiobase.com and clicking the download link found on your personal home page as seen in the following image.

After logging into CI BioBase, click on the "Download CIBioBase Upload Tool" link and the download process will begin.  This must only be done one time as future updates will be done automatically through the new tool.  After installing the new tool, if you get prompted with the following message when opening the application, click "Yes" to download and upgrade your upload tool to the latest release.

NOTE:  You will need Administrator rights on your local machine to install the tool.  If you are not an Administrator, please contact your internal IT Department for assistance with the installation.

We continue to plan enhancements to the upload tool.  Keeping it up to date will ensure your experience is as smooth as possible when uploading large amounts of data!

NOTE:  If you are currently running the previous version of the upload tool, please feel free to un-install it as it will no longer be needed after installing the new tool.

Getting Started

As an introduction to the new CI BioBase Upload Tool, we want to ensure you know the basics of how the tool works and where you can find certain information.  To start, everything was designed to be fast and easy to use.  The interface is light, but effective.  As shown in the figure below, there are only two areas of interaction.

1. The menu system is used for launching web pages, checking configuration information and exiting the application.  The key menu option to highlight, as shown below, is under "Help" >> "About...", which will display a quick pop up window that contains 1. the current version of the tool, 2. the local directory used for staging pre-uploaded trips and 3. the location of the log file on your local machine.

If an error occurs, an entry is written to the Log File Location. This file is very important for troubleshooting potential issues that arise from the wide variety of network and local machine configurations. If an exception occurs and support is needed, check your "About..." menu option to find the location of the AppLog.log file and send the AppLog.log file to Contour Innovations at email@contourinnovations.com to ensure that any issue is resolved quickly!

2.  The content area contains two functionalities.  The first is the login area where you can specify your username and password to login to the client tool.  Once logged in, you will be able to start uploading your files.  Your username is stored locally in a configuration file, but for security purposes, you will be required to specify your password every time you launch the application.

After you have logged into the tool, you will be presented with the file upload and status content area as shown below.

To upload files simply click Select Files and select the Lowrance SLG and/or SL2 files you wish to upload.  A key feature to highlight is the multi-select capability in the Select Files browser window.  As shown in the following image, you can use the multi-select feature by holding CTRL while you select the individual files you want to upload, or you can select the first file in a larger file set then hold SHIFT and select the last file.  This will automatically select all files between the first and last file in your file set.

Once you have all of the files selected, click Open and they will be imported into the content area of the CI BioBase Upload Tool.  If you happen to select an invalid file type, the tool will notify you that a specific file is not the correct format and it will not be added to your local upload queue.  If you happen to select a file with the same name, the tool will ask you if you still want to add it.  You still have the option to add multiple files with the same name.  There is no reason to upload the same file twice, but in some cases, you may have different files with the same name that need to be uploaded.

Once you have all of the files ready to go in your queue, click the upload button, as shown below.  This will kick off the upload sequence and the tool will handle the rest.

At any point during the upload, if you decide that you do not want to upload a certain file, click the Red "X" on the right hand side of the file.  This will remove the file from your local queue. 
Once the upload begins, feel free to monitor the status of your trip uploads or move on to some other work while the upload completes.  Your computer must remain on and an active Internet connection is required for files to complete the upload process.  The CI BioBase Upload Tool window must remain open while the upload progresses and, as shown in the following image, the upload tool will provide you with real time status updates of each file in your local queue.

1.  Files that complete will be represented with a green checkmark.  Once a file completes, the next file in the queue will begin to upload until all files have been completed.

2.  Other statuses include Compressing, Compressed, Uploading and Error.  If a file hits an unrecoverable error, the file record will be marked with an error and the exception will be written to your AppLog.log file (as discussed earlier in this post).  At that point, please send your AppLog.log file to email@contourinnovations.com for support and we will assist in resolving the error.

3.  If you decide to cancel the entire upload, click "Clear" on the bottom of the content area. This will cancel all file uploads and clear all files out of your local queue.

4.  A small summary is maintained throughout the entire upload process.  You can track your progress via this text and once complete you will see a message of:

"Upload complete with # error(s)"

If the # of errors does not equal 0 (zero), please send your AppLog.log file to email@contourinnovations.com to ensure that we can assist in resolving the error.

As always, the Contour Innovations team will continue to release updates and feature enhancements to the system as a whole while providing a high level support to CI BioBase users!  We welcome all feedback, questions and inquiries sent to email@contourinnovations.com!
We hope you find value and time savings in the new CI BioBase Upload Tool!