Location (GPS): show geographic coordinate system (GCS) formatted latitude & longitude

[towel]

The POSITION and SIMPLE views for Location (GPS) show latitude and longitude degrees with decimal notation.

For several use cases, e.g. sending nautical distress radio calls, GCS formatted coordinates are required / expected. Therefore, it would be nice and useful to show the GPS coordinates in this additional formatting.

e.g. decimal degrees: +40.446 -79.982
is sexagesimal degree: degrees, minutes, seconds: 40° 26′ 46″ N 79° 58′ 56″ W
equals degrees and decimal minutes: 40° 26.767′ N 79° 58.933′ W

This information could be shown in the SIMPLE tab and would be much appreciated.

see Wikipedia: Geographic coordinate conversion

[Staacks]

I have put it on our todo list. Unfortunately, a proper implementation of this feature is a bit more work than one might think at first glance. You might know that all the interfaces are not hardcoded, but defined by our own file format which allows users to create their own configurations. In many cases this allows us to quickly provide solutions to specific wishes, but in this case we need to add the feature to the file format, which means that the Android version, iOS version and the web interface need to support it.

So, here is what I plan to do (partly as a note to myself as I am not sure if we can tackle this soon):

• Add an attribute format to the value view element. The default format="float" would be the current behaviour (example 42.123 or 4.2123e1) and for now I would also add format="degree-minutes" (example 42° 7.38') and format="degree-minutes-seconds" (example 42° 7' 23'').
• Add attributes positiveUnit and negativeUnit which replace the regular unit for positive/negative values if set. This allows to set north/south and east/west postfixes independently and being able to translate them (for example, it is N,S,E,W in English, but N,S,O,W in German and I have seen many more variants in our translation system). This could also be useful for other applications and allows to reuse the new format for non-geographic use cases (whichever there might be).

The only difference to your suggestion for the resulting user interface will be that for now latitude and longitude will be on separate lines as the value element only supports a single input at the moment.

Unfortunately, I cannot say if we can add it for the next release or if it will be one of the nice-to-have items that will be on the todo list for a while. It should be straightforward to implement without any surprises, but it requires changes in many places.