IronPython script for emergency calls

10 Feb 2009 - Dave

Here’s the problem — the firehouse receives a dispatch report from the county for all emergency calls.  Information in those dispatches wasn’t getting out all the time.

In the beginning the firehouse had a dot-matrix printer connected to a dedicated phone line.  The printer had a built-in modem and answered the dispatches from the county.  It worked but wasn’t too flexible and it dispatches were lost when the printer messed up.

A pretty slick macro that ran in Procomm replaced the printer.  Procomm ran on a PC and captured the text of the dispatches with the modem.  The macro printed a copy of the dispatch to the firehouse’s networked laser printer.  The macro also emailed some of the dispatch to the phones of firemen and EMTs.  The Procomm macro was a big improvement but the text that it was emailing was sometimes too much for the limited mobile email of the phones.

I developed the IronPython script to take advantage of the text dispatches created by the Procomm macro.  The Python language is better suited to parse out fields of data from the dispatch.  Once the script parsed the fields it creates a number of customized messages for the chiefs, EMTs and firemen’s specific need.  The script routes the custom messages to members of each group.  The script also inserts the parsed information into a database.

We have plans to improve the IronPython script but for now it is meeting the needs.