Function to generate import file to update Monitoring Locations with alternate IDs in WQP

[hillarymarler]

While doing some thinking about creating/updating batch import files for ATTAINS in TADA, I also thought about how the WQP 3.0 profiles can store alternate location identifiers with any monitoring location identifiers. If TADA users go through all the work in TADA to identify two differently named monitoring locations as effectively being the same monitoring location, would it be helpful to provide users with an easy way to add this information to the portal?

I think it would be pretty straightforward to download the monitoring location profiles via WQP web services, modify the alternate location identifiers column to incorporate the newly identified alternates and produce an output that would be formatted for upload to WQP. (Users would only be able to update the alternate IDs for their own org's monitoring locations.)

[cristinamullin]

This is a great topic to discuss at a future WQX team meeting. Organizations could update the alternate IDs for their own org's monitoring locations. Instead, it may also be possible for them to retire & remove old sites and their data and replace those with the new site names (including moving the associated data over to the new site). There is some overlap here with TADA duplicate data checks - meaning that it is one reason we may find duplicate data within an org (they retire a site internally but not in WQX/WQP, and then load the same historical data to a new site ID and only add new data to the new site in WQX/WQP).