Well I guess this is it! After hearing Keith say it for about 3 years at multiple #WLPC’s and trainings, I’m finally doing it: Yes this will be my very first blogpost.

As a minor disclaimer I need to tell you that English is not my native language and some grammar & spelling errors are more than likely to appear, but please bear with me :-)

I thought I’d start this of with something small. Some Ekahau trickery that for some of you might be information you already knew. Anyway, I didn’t know about it, googled it: No Results.

At that point I turned to the 2nd most powerful search engine, the WiFi community on Twitter et voila.

It took some time & the intervening of one of Ekahau’s finest AKA @ekamikko, but i got there. That reminds me: the little procedure i’m about to show you is at your own risk! So remember to always make a back-up copy before you do this.

The issue explained:

I was surveying a large office area with 4 floors. Of the 4 floors, floor 1& 2 were identical.

When I started surveying on floor 1, I made the mistake of capturing the data on the map of floor 2.

There’s my problem: I need to walk that floor again or do I? Nope. I just need to transfer the data from floor 2 to floor 1. But how?

Enter Mikko with some Twitter magic:

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As you save a project, you see the pop-up window telling you : compressing files. And in you’re finder or explorer… or whatever you might be using the .esx file will show up. Well, when it’s compressing it actually just gathering all the xml’s that make up your .esx file and zipping them. There’s the key right there.

Unzip the file and al the text files will be right there. Look for the survey xml, these represent the survey paths you’ve taken. Those will have elements with mapID. As you will have guessed, the MapID corresponds with the floorpans you’ve imported in your project.

Once you’re in there, you will need to know which surveys you want to transfer and to which plan. Once you found the corresponding survey.xml all you need to do is change the mapId to the desired value.

Zip the files again and rename it. Open en you’ll be good to go! There you just saved some mileage on those brand new shoes.

A more visual explanation of what happened:

Captured data on floor 2, while physically surveying on floor 1:

Step 1:
Make a back-up copy of the file you want to tamper with.

Step 2:
Rename the file with a .zip extension and use any application you have at your disposal to unzip the file.

Step 3:
Look for the “project.xml". In here you’ll find to what imported map the mapId is corresponding.

Step 4:
Copy the map id where you want the survey to be transferred to: "0" This seems anal but in my case it was crucial. When i deleted the “2" and typed “1" it used a different font for it, causing the file not to open correctly. So this is kind of a safety measure, but i’d still advise you to do it.

Step 5:
Find the survey.xml’s you need to transfer. You can find it by looking at the startTime in the xml file and comparing it to the start time of the survey in your Ekahau project.

Step 6:
Select all the mapId=“2" you see in the respective xml file and change it to the value you need. In this case: “1" Should look like this now:

That’s 1 survey path that will now be transferred to the correct floor plan. Repeat this with all survey paths you need to transfer.

Now repeat this for all survey paths you need to transfer.

Step 7:
Zip the file, rename it to whatever you think is best. I named it: (Yep, it took my 3 tries)

Step 8:
Open the file and continue surveying.

Tip: The more seperate surveys you record, the more surveys you could end up changing. Same goes for the clicks while surveying.

Keep that in mind when you’re doing the clicking 😉 As the master explained it to us in training: click when start/stop/start/turn/doors. If you can go in a straight line, go!

Thanks for reading.

Hope to see you soon.

Yannick

yannick.heymans@layerone.be

Follow @yannickheymans