We want to extend the geographical coverage of our SMART patrolling to include three areas that are neighbouring and contiguous with our existing CA. We would like to be able to report seperately on activities and statistics from each of these areas as well as the CA. But they would have the same data model, and overlap in staffing.
What would be a good way for us to set up these news areas in SMART?
Is is better to add them to the existing CA? This feel like the least admin but I’m not sure the option we could have for reporting from each area individually. I can see options for Admin areas, management sectors, patrol sectors but not sure how easy it is to report for any of these individually. My efforts to use trial Area Filters have failed because the name of the area is too long. The filter doesn’t recognise the edited name I have given only the original which seems to be a long list of coordinates.
Or should we create new CAs for each area. This feels like a much greater administrative task both in the setup and also in the ongoing maintenance. For example I assume we would need to switch between CAs in desktop in order to process Connect data for each area.
I don’t think we will need to limit access for SMART users to specific areas, but I imagine we would have to choose the second option if we needed to do this. i.e. we can’t give users access to data from only part of a CA?
There are two ways tondo this, both you have described somewhat. Adding the areas to you existing CA should work. Not sure why you are having issues with the area queries. Those should work for reporting on the different areas separately. Feel free to post additional info if you want help on the spatial queries.
You could also create separate CAs as you have described. For reporting you can use the cross conservation area analysis function if you want to look at the data together.
Thanks Richard. I think spatial queries would be the way to go but I will need some help sorting them out. I managed to overcome the issue mentioned above where the query refused to run. This was due to an issue with the naming field in the original shapefile I had imported. Having adjusted that the queries run. But…
At present a spatial query seems to work for patrol tracks, correctly selecting the tracks in each sector (I’ve imported two Admin areas areas shapefiles to test this out). I was surprised to see it doesn’t clip the tracks to the boundary of the sector. It seems to include the whole length of any track that crosses into the sector? Is that right?
For observations and summaries I’m not seeing any obvious selection happening within sectors. Do observations have to be assigned to the sector when the data are collected in order for this to work? I assumed it was a geographical function that extracted the observations based on location.
yes, the spatial filters extract info based on the shape files that have been loaded, or you can create custom areas to query by. The spatial filters can be applied to any of the query types, and you can also create spatial group-bys in the summary queries. Observations do not have to be assigned to sectors for these to work. Perhaps there is an issue with you shapefile?
Can you tell me if the spatial query should clip the target data using the boundary? The query on patrol tracks selects the right patrols but still displays parts of the track that started outside the respective area. Similar with observations, they aren’t being clipped to show only those inside the area.
Thanks
Spatial queries now working. My error was with the notation for the filter. I had two categories I was filtering with using an OR statement in addition to the spatial filter but I only added the spatial filter once in the expression. It needed “category AND spatial OR category AND spatial”.
J