Gasboy PC CFN site controller - Manual (Page 17)

MDE-4489 Gasboy® PC/CFN User’s Guide·July 2005 Page 13
Terms to Know PC/CFN Basics
Manifolded Tank
A manifolded tank is two tanks containing the same product joined together by a common pipe
and used as a single source for dispensing fuel.
Polling (Autopolling, Unscheduled, Continuous)
Polling is the process by which the PC software contacts a fuel site and extracts the raw
transactions from the fuel management system at the site. Other actions may also be performed
at this time, such as updating lookup records, updating lockouts, and executing extra
commands. There are three polling options available through the Gasboy PC software, namely
autopolling, unscheduled polling, and continuous polling:
• Autopolling is the easiest and most automatic way to poll your sites on a regular basis.
You can include all of your sites, or just selected sites. When you set up your Fuel Sites,
each site that you wish to include in the autopolling process must have the Poll Flag field
set to YES. You can set the PC software to autopoll every hour or set up to four times each
day when the PC will automatically attempt to perform selected polling actions. You
select the actions you wish to run for each polling time. If connection cannot be
established with a site, PC/CFN continues polling other sites and then makes two more
attempts to re-poll the site. If an error occurs during any polling action, the connection is
terminated and no further actions are performed for that site. Upon completion, a polling
log is generated.
• Unscheduled polling is a manual polling option that allows you to poll one or more sites at
any time (on demand). Because autopolling is performed only on sites where the Poll Flag
is set to YES, if you wish to poll other fuel sites (or even one typically scheduled for
autopolling), you would use unscheduled polling. The available polling actions are
identical to those you can select under autopolling.
• Continuous polling allows you to poll a single site continuously for transactions only; no
other polling actions are allowed.
RAWTRANS
When transactions are polled from your fuel sites, they are stored directly to the database.
Each time you generate a RAWTRANS file it serves as a snapshot of the raw transactions in
the PC database at the time of generation. You decide when your file will be generated, which
format you are using, which transactions to include and where the file will be stored on your
PC by selecting settings on the Default Communication Parameters menu.
When Poll Transactions is selected as a polling action either for autopoll, unscheduled poll, or
continuous poll, you can choose to have the file generated automatically at the end of polling.
If you don't choose this, the only way to generate a raw transaction file is to use the Gen
Retrains button on the Utilities form.
When you perform any operation affecting transactions, you alter transactions in the database
but not in the RAWTRANS file that you have generated. If you use automatic file generation,
you'll get an updated RAWTRANS file each time you poll or you can re-run the Gen
RAWTRANS utility from the Utility form. NOTE: Raw transactions are not automatically
purged from the PC database after the RAWTRANS file is generated.