Expand

[Martin Woodford]

Hi @brian-mcg
Thank you. Yes, that works. I very much appreciate the experience you've shared in this thread.
However - to the MRA team, the expand function is part of what we pay for. I don't expect to have to rely on the knowledge and goodwill of forum members to make something work properly.

[Marinus van Deudekom]

@Martin-Woodford The first impression on opening your route

You can see that the point 6, 7 and 8 are not in a logical order resulting in a dark black line as I suspected

next problem is indeed like @brian-mcg suspected the starting point on the other end off the tunnel / ferry witch resulted in the route being verry long. Deleting the first 2 points will result in the route being expanded like you want. In my case I expanded to 20 points.

[Marinus van Deudekom]

@Martin-Woodford I have to put in a good word for the team. As you can see part of the failure was due to a mistake in your route. The other part is that you didn't know that expanding a route in witch a tunnel or Ferry plays a roll, you"ll get strange results. So no mistake by MRA.
Beeing a RouteXpert myself I must confess, witch rarely happens, that I didn't know the Ferry bit myself.

[Martin Woodford]

Absolutely not. This is my original 14 point route
https://www.myrouteapp.com/route/open/13569227

[Martin Woodford]

The new point number 8 can be identified as an MRA expand point because it's labelled "waypoint" the ones I manually placed have road numbers

[Martin Woodford]

I don't see how "expanding a route in witch a tunnel or Ferry plays a roll, you"ll get strange results. So no mistake by MRA" can be the case. Why should a tunnel or ferry mean the results are strange ? I'm in Norway at the moment, there are hundreds of tunnels and ferries should I expect strange results everytime one is on my route ?

[Marinus van Deudekom]

The problem occurs when you expansie the route.
In your original route you can see that the order of the shapingpoints is not logical. See my screenshot.

[Martin Woodford]

Hi @marinus-van-deudekom
Thanks for your comments. The screenshot you show is from the expanded route. This is my original 14 point, 377.32 mile route. In a moment I'll expand it in MRA and screenshot it again (MRA makes the changes in realtime and I don't know how to save versions of the original and expanded route)

[Martin Woodford]

Hi @marinus-van-deudekom
This is the expanded version. Please note the location of the new waypoint 8 and it's description.

[Martin Woodford]

I will now reset the original in MRA

[Brian McG]

@Martin-Woodford the web site planner is pretty long in the tooth, you can holler at the moon for what it is worth but nothing is going to be updated with the current version
there are plans for a complete revamp of the web site planner, what the time line is I have no clue

MRA is only a small team & they do not have the resources to fix all the old issues like this & also produce a new revamped planner
till the new site update, I am sorry but you will just have to learn to keep an eye on the mileage

[Martin Woodford]

Hi @marinus-van-deudekom
Did you find a problem with my original 14 point route ?
If you expand it to 15 points do you get the same problem with the new waypoint 8 ?
Thanks

[Marinus van Deudekom]

@Martin-Woodford Yes I did because points 6, 7 and 8 were not in a logical order. In my screenshot you'll see the dark black line

[Don Stauffer]

In my case, the original route was fine, and I double checked it using the ''simulation" feature. The problem occurred only after expanding. There was, however, a ferry involved in the route. Apparently the 'expand' feature does not like water!

[Martin Woodford]

Hi @don-stauffer
My original was fine as well (see posts #21 and #22 above).
In the absence of anything from MRA it looks like the very useful and helpful tips from @brian-mcg are the way to go.

[Marinus van Deudekom]

Unless you have us the wrong route to start with you seem to be unable to notice your own mistake

[Martin Woodford]

Hi @marinus-van-deudekom
I tried, but clearly failed, to explain the situation in posts #21 and #22 above. As I said in post #23 the route is now set to my original 14 waypoints (including start and end), 377.32 miles.
For your own satisfaction maybe you'd like to try opening it and using expand increase the number of waypoints to 15. See what happens.

[Con Hennekens]

The expand function is not much more than placing new route points at calculated intervals. There is no AI or human logic incorporated. Logic you will need to apply yourself afterwards. I doubt that that will ever change. Therefore I always place my own route points. The expand function adds too many anyway. As far as I am concerned, it does not return on the new web planner at all.

[Brian McG]

@Con-Hennekens said:
As far as I am concerned, it does not return on the new web planner at all.

In another thread you asked why I would worry about the baby being thrown out with the bath water with the new web planner
The omission of the expand function would be the sort of thing that for me would be not an upgrade/update but a downgrade, the baby going out

The expand function is not perfect but it does have it's uses & people do use it
An smarter cleverer expand function is what the new planner should have if the new planner is to be an improvement

[Stevedo 6 0]

I also find the Expand feature to be extremely frustrating at times. Here's an example where I created a 293.63km route with 8 waypoints. I currently export my routes to my Garmin 595 so want to Expand the route to include some extra shaping points. I Expand the route to 15 points total and the new route goes from 293.63km to 553.54km!!!! Note that my original points are all in the correct order.

I sure hope that this feature can both be retained and improved in the new planner as when it works it can be very useful.