AlpineQuest & OfflineMaps

I've been using AQ with NOAA ENC nautical charts (depth in feet) for a while. They recently stopped working. I assumed it was yet another server changing the rules, which happens a lot in the world of maps.

After looking into it I found that things still worked correctly for depths in meters. The only difference is an extra "display_params" value which specifies depth units. It is not used for meters since that is the default. The display_params syntax uses 3 levels of nested curly braces and another level of square braces, characters which can cause problems in a URL.

I modified the .aqx file to escape the braces (e.g. %7B for '{') and it works fine. Best guess is that newer server software got a bit more picky about URL syntax. I also changed the display_params version to the latest, which is 10.9.1. I don't know how community maps are maintained, but it does need to be updated. The URL for fathoms needs the same fix.

If you do it as an end user, be sure not to change the CDATA square braces, which are valid XML syntax or the $bbox curly braces, which are the AQ parameter substitution syntax.

Thank you Charlie,
I've update those maps. You're right, after correctly escaping the display params, the feet version does work fine again!

I did an update to replace my temporary fix with the new official version and can confirm that it works correctly for depth units of "feet".

I mentioned in the original post that depth units of "fathoms" had the same problem but that fix seems to be missing. I doubt if anyone cares about fathoms but you probably want it to work.

Thank you for supporting your product so well.

I've also corrected the fathoms version, it costs nothing. Thanks!