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Areas

The Areas module is used to create, view and reassign areas.

The Areas screen is shown below:

You can change the columns that are displayed on the Areas pane by configuring the grid.

To create a new area, click the Create New Area button. Then, enter in the Area Name, State, and Screen Bucket in the text boxes.

You can search the available buckets by clicking the Search button to the right of the Screen Bucket text box.

Once you have entered all the necessary info, click the Save button. If any required info is not entered, an error message will pop up and required fields will be yellow.

To view a specific area, enter in the name of the area into the Area Name box and click the Search button located to the right of the Assign To text box. You may also bring up a list of all areas by leaving the Area Name box blank and then clicking the Search button.

When viewing an area you may also reassign it to a different user bucket. You can do this two different ways:

1. Click the Search button to the right of the Screen Bucket text box and select a new bucket.

2. Click on the Users tab and search for a user. Then highlight a user and click the Assign button. The area will now be assigned to this user's bucket.

If an area does not have routing rules associated with it then it can be deleted with the Delete button. The user will be asked to confirm the operation and then will remove the selected areas from the list:

If some of the areas to be deleted have associated routing rules then the following message is shown. Even if this happens the other selected areas are still deleted.

Area Routing

Areas can have polygons associated with them for routing. These polygons can be imported from shapefiles.

In addition to area polygons, routing is defined with custom routing rules or city-county-state rules. These two types of rules take precedence over routing by area polygons.

View and Edit Existing Routing Areas

To view the areas and their polygons open the Admin : Routing : Area screen. The polygons are displayed graphically on the map in the lower-right.

If you select a single polygon, the display will change to show a small square at each point. These points can be dragged with the mouse to change the shape of the polygon.

Import Shapefile

To import areas from a shapefile press the Import Shapefile button. In the file selection dialog, navigate to the shapefile and select it. In the same folder should be the other related files, usually prj, dbf, shx, sbx, sbn files.

The following special cases can occur when importing shapefiles:

• If some of the imported shapes have holes inside of them, then these holes will be removed during the import process.
• If some of the shapes consist of two or more separete polygons then only one of those polygons will be imported.

If either of these conditions occures then the use will see a warning message with details about the problem.

The first step of the import wizard will read the shapefile fields and allow the user to identify which fields to import.

• Area Name - specify the shapefile field to use for the area name
• Locator - specify the shapefile field to use to identify the locator to assign the area to. This can either be the locator's login, name, or the name of the locator's bucket.
• State - specify the shapefile field to use as the state on the area. If a state field is not available in the shapefile data, then provide a default value to apply to the areas.

The next step will show possible results of the import, without actually saving areas to the system.

After user confirmation, areas will be imported to the system and used to route tickets.

Export Shapefile

The Export Shapefile button performs the opposite operation of the Import Shapefile. It produces a shapefile that contains the polygons for the areas that are displayed in the search results at the top of the screen.

Viewing Area Usage

To see how the Area is used by routing rules click on the Usage tab. This tab lists the routing rules that reference the Area.

The main search table also provide information about how Areas are used. The columns Custom Routing Rules and City-County-Routes provide counts of the number of rouring rules of each type that reference an Area.