Loading the Bid Line Data
The bid line data for each bid month is generated by Southwest Airlines® and posted to the secure Crew Portal sever. These data files are in several formats and more information can be found in the program’s help file.
For loading bid line date, The Bid Meister!/FAM! uses the formatted data files that end with “.737”. This operation is integrated on the Load Monthly Bid Data display by use of the Auto Download Mode button. The current mode status is displayed above the button and shown above and is normally left on.
When The Bid Meister!/FAM!! downloads the requested data files, they are stored on your hard drive in the folder you have set up, or, by default, the folder where you installed the program, normally c:\bm31.
Loading the bid line data is straightforward. It’s just a matter of picking the month of data you wish to see. Here’s how to do it:
Start The Bid Meister!/FAM!! and on the main display look for the button labeled Load Monthly Bid Data.
Clicking on Load Monthly Bid Data allows you to load the bid line data
Clicking on the button will bring up the loading display as show below:
Current year shown is 2003, month of October.
There are several functions that can be accomplished from this display. When the display is first accessed, the month of the currently loaded data is selected. In this case, it’s October of 2004. Note that the calendar year of the data is displayed at the top of the panel.
To select the month of data to load, merely click on the button corresponding to the month you want to load. After selecting the month, click on the OK button to start the loading process.
If the Auto Download Mode is on, then you will be prompted for your crew portal user ID and password. The program will then use your Internet account to access the Internet and download the requested files.
Auto Downloading of Bid Line Data
You do not have to continually re-download the current month’s data files once you have downloaded them once. They will remain on your hard drive until you delete them. For example, if the current month is September and you are bidding for October, you’ll select the button for the month of October (as shown above) and click OK. Once the data file is downloaded from the crew portal, it is loaded and ready for your use. After completing your bidding, you might want to go back and load the September data for printing your schedule, etc until the end of the month. When you want to load October again, you repeat the process of selecting the October button and clicking OK. However, The Bid Meister!/FAM!! will detect the data file is already on your system and will then prompt you to re-download the data or use the file that is currently on your system. You have the option of re-downloading the files from the portal or using the file on your system.
Note that the data files are available for download until the 6th or 7th of the next month when the new data for the following bid period becomes available. Older data files are not available on the crew portal.
If you are loading older data files, you may want to disable auto-downloading to prevent nuisance prompts. In this case simply click on the Auto Download Mode button and the annunciator will reverse and display the mode as off:
So, to review, the Load Monthly Bid Data display allows you to either load a previous month’s data file available on your system, or to access the latest available data file that’s on the crew portal server.
Changing the Calendar Year
The data files for the bid line data generated by the company currently do not have a time/date stamp in them that allows The Bid Meister!/FAM!! to tell what the month and year of the contained data are. The date of contained data is assumed from the date on the file itself and is usually sufficient for our operations, but there are cases where you’ll want to manually set the date yourself.
Normally you don’t have to worry about setting the year of the data. As the January data becomes available for the next year, The Bid Meister!/FAM!! will prompt you to change the year of the data. However, if you want to go back to a previous year of data such as reloading the December 2003 data after having completed your bids for January 2004, you’ll have to tell BM what year of data you want to load.
If you attempt to load a data file for a bid month that is a year out of date, The Bid Meister!/FAM!! will warn you of the date conflict and prompt you whether to continue loading or stop. It’s perfectly all right to continue loading so long as you correct the date problem with the Manual Set Year function.
Clicking on the Manual Set Year button will bring up a dialog box prompting you for the year of the data. Entering a year will immediately change the calendar of the currently loaded data to the date you entered. The new year will be reflected at the top of the panel as shown below.
Entering the year will change the data calendar
Viewing and Changing the Data Directory
You may view the data files that are currently stored on your hard drive by clicking on the View/Chg Data Directory button. Clicking on this button will bring up a file list dialog box that will allow you to view the files and change the data directory as well. Normally you would change the data directory from the System Setup display, but access is provided here for convenience.
Viewing the available data files in the current data directory
Using the drive selection box and the associated directory tree, you can navigate to a new folder to access or store data files. Clicking on the Set Data Path button shown in the above graphic will assign the current path displayed at the top of the form as the new data path.
Note that the default location for the data path is the folder where you installed The Bid Meister!/FAM!! program itself and is, in most cases, fine for your use.
Selecting Extra Files to Download
You can pre-select bid package files to download along with the data formatted file when loading the bid line data. For example, you can download the bid package cover sheet, seniority list, and the text copy of the bid lines each time you by the following easy steps:
Click on the Setup drop-down menu and select the Auto Download Files Setup… item as shown:
Accessing the Auto Download Files Setup menu item
After selecting this item, you’ll be presented with the following dialog which will allow you to pre-select the various files that you want to download along with formatted data file that will be loaded when you click the OK button.
Selecting additional files to download
In the above case, the bid package cover sheet, seniority list and the text bid lines files are to be downloaded with the formatted data file. Clicking the Save button will keep this selection for future downloads and you can change this anytime you wish.
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