How to add manual segment to a Routino route?

[SengerM]

I am trying QMapShack for the first time and I am finding it really nice. I am planning a bike route and facing the following limitation/issue:

I keep finding this is supposed to be the right way of dealing with this kind of "limitations" but it does not work for me. I also found someone having the same issue in this GitHub issue. I don't know if I am doing something wrong, or this is a bug. Help is appreciated.

[kiozen]

Yes, this is a limitation to routes. The editor is for both routes and tracks. And the underlying data model of routes and tracks is kind of oriented towards the GPX specification. This has some benefits but also quite a bunch of limitations.

Especially the route data format of GPX is mediocre. And that is the friendly adjective. A route is simply a list of waypoints. Period. No additional information about auto-routed segments etc. As a consequence everyone started to handle routes their own way. A collection of intermediate waypoints A,B,C.. that need auto-routing. A list of waypoints that model the complete routed route. A collection of waypoints with excessive proprietary extensions (e.g. Garmin). It's a mess and up to this day I did not find a good solution to handle routes in a satisfactory way.

Small fun fact in between: The GPX track format has segments and is much closer to a route data model. However if it comes to track segments there is also no common sense how to handle these in a uniform way.

Anyway, long story short: Route support is still very undeveloped in QMapShack due to these issues. And no one really took care of the peculiarities in QMapShack concerning routes.

I think most users, including me, use tracks. These are reliably working on any kind of device, however there is no routing guidance in terms of driving instructions.

Conclusion:

• If you work with routes in the editor avoid using the manual modes. Only use auto-routing. By that the route will be recalculated properly. If it does not route as expected it's usually a routing data or routing profile issue. e.g. if the pedestrian tunnel is ignored it's either not mapped correctly in the OSM database, or your profile (bicycle, car, etc) is not allowed to use pedestrian tunnels.

I also recommend using BRouter these days. It is much easier to update the database and it's much more flexible to adjust the profiles.

• If you work with tracks you can use the full flexibility of the editor in QMapShack. However you loose the recalculation. On the other hand side if the track data is stored in QMapShack's format, it keeps all information about it's segments. By that you can re-edit the track to fine tune sections.

• If it comes to exporting the route to a device, routes will fail most likely. The device most likely will calculate the route different. And if it comes to Garmin the route would need to carry the proprietary extra data. And so far no one found out how to produce that data (it's using hashes and no one knows how to generate these hashes).

I know it's a bit disappointing but that is the state of routes in QMapShack. But everyone is welcome to enhance the situation by providing code patches 😄

[kiozen]

I think I add a ticket, to disable the buttons for track, vector and freehand routing if a route is created in the line edit tool. By that it's less confusing for the user.

[kiozen]

That's the ticket #1075