NOAA Rainfall Reader

How it works

Note: The rainfall data files for are stored in the assets folder.

1. Each file is read in asynchronously on a background thread and the contents of each file are placed as an entry in a list
2. This list of file contents is then fed to a function that parses the data into a list of usable data objects of type PrecipitationEntry
   • This function will filter out any unparseable and non-Arizona entries
   • Returns a list of PrecipationEntry where each entry is the total rainfall for a given year
3. The data returned from the previous function is then given to a function to present it in the UI

Files

• MainActivity.kt - It's main purpose is to initiate the logic to interpret the files and then to display them. In a full application some of the logical code would be pushed to a ViewModel so the view only has responsibility over displaying the data, but this app is very simple so I left it in there.
• FileHelper.kt - Provides a method to read the contents of the files in the assets foler
• PrecipitationEntryHelper.kt - The main logic for parsing the data files lies in this helper class
• EntryPositions.kt - This enum abstracts any index ranges that are defined for different data elements in the file entries
• PrecipitationEntry.kt - The main data class that contains the parsed data.

Notes

I took a more simple approach to parsing only the data that was necessary. There were a lot of data points and a lot of different rules. After reading through them all it boiled down to need to parse out the Year, State Code, and the 2500 time entry, which contains the rainfall total for that entire day. If the 2500 time entry was anything other than a parseable number it meant there was something wrong with the data for that day so I just skipped reading that information.