Day Part Forecasts

The day part forecasts are a custom forecast implemented by the Bell Weather reader but other data sources/readers may support it in the future as well.

Day-Parts are in a fixed order (mostly)

The day-part ( morning, afternoon, etc) forecast types are set to always display in the same order in Flow. Note that there is the day-part cycle that can rotate through this order. More on this in the Day-Part order cycle section below.

  • part1 = morning

  • part2 = afternoon

  • part3 = evening

  • part4 = night

  • part5 = next morning

You can see this in the Weather Type Setup tab in the weather module of Flow:

Day-Part Name Editing

You probably shouldn’t bother editing the part names because the reader may provide the current part name applicable to each part.

These day-part forecasts have a Part Name associated with them to allow you to enter an appropriate name in case the default isn't suitable. However changing this name doesn’t change what forecast type it is.  For example if you have more room and you want to label Morning as This Morning or you want to display an abbreviation instead like Morn. and Aft. and Eve (for Morning Afternoon and Evening respectively). The player relies on the forecast type codes and not the part name that you can type in. So it is always looking for forecast part2 to display as the afternoon data. So while you change it to have part name = Morning saved in the part2 forecast the player still uses part2 as the afternoon.

Day-Part order cycle (so not totally fixed)

There is one additional wrinkle to the day-part forecasts that has been glossed over so far: the day-part forecast data coming from the Bell weather source appears to be a moving time window. This ordering of the parts with names starting with part1 = morning, part2 = afternoon applies if you request the weather data early in the morning. However later in the day it will change to be the following:

  • part1 = afternoon

  • part2 = evening

  • part 3 = night

  • etc.

The weather parser correctly updates the part name to match the part name provided in the forecast data from the weather source. So as long as you do not manually edit the part names - the correct part names will be displayed in Flow.

For example - a test run of the weather reader shows these day-part forecasts for Toronto airport returned by the weather source when run at 2:00 pm:

"part1":{"date":"06/18/2015","name":"Thursday","partname":"Afternoon","graphic":"9","description":"Lightning visible","temperature":"25"}, "part2":{"date":"06/18/2015","name":"Thursday","partname":"Evening","graphic":"11","description":"Thunderstorms","temperature":"21"}, "part3":{"date":"06/18/2015","name":"Thursday","partname":"Night","graphic":"32","description":"Partly cloudy","temperature":"12"}}, "part4":{"date":"06/19/2015","name":"Friday","partname":"Morning","graphic":"1","description":"Mainly sunny","temperature":"16"}, "part5":{"date":"06/19/2015","name":"Friday","partname":"Afternoon","graphic":"0","description":"Sunny","temperature":"20"},