A recent question came up about being able to query independent incidents captured during a patrol.
If it’s important that an observation is reported on as being part of a patrol then ideally it would not be recorded as an independent incident.
We understand there may be use cases where a certain class of observation needs to be an independent incident and at the same time, there is a valid question - which patrol was it captured on.
Other than using dates, there are a few options that can get you close:
Using the incident id naming so you have both the observation name and the time to use in a query
Adding a field to the model to capture the patrol
Is reporting on independent incidents that are part of a patrol a common need?
Hi @jpalmer. I follow up on this topic because we were using SMART Mobile and realized that we were able to report an incident both outside and inside the patrol. This was a little confusing since we understand an incident as an observation outside the patrol.
Glad to read about your experiences, and how you report incidents.
@Jackie There are instances where users have suggested that they want to record an independent incident while on patrol. This has typically been driven by a separate need - eg, a different reporting or configurable model need. I don’t use these at any of my sites though, so can’t speak to any specific experience.
Re-upping the theme in @jpalmer 's note above - the request came from users wanting an incident recorded while on patrol to have some association with the patrol, in case there was any need for follow-up. This makes a lot of logical sense to me, but for all of the sites I work with, it makes much more sense to build any relevant data that COULD be collected on patrols into the patrol configurable model, and not to separate it out into an incident. Similarly, we have some sites that use the independent incident only feature, and forego the patrol framework.