2.4 Mapping, Open Process and Payment Integration

In 2.3 we added the ability to record the geolocation of an incident in a map that you could add without code.

However, this only placed the location of the issue into the PDF sent to the back office.

With this release there are three new functions:

a) The ability to automatically map the location of an issue reported into OpenProcess without code.

b) The ability to configure an OpenProcess to be retrieved by eDesigner.

c) The ability to show a customer already reported issues of the same or different types so as to prevent duplicate reports.

These three things in conjunction with one another provide functionality to digitise the capture, progress tracking and management of reported issues thus enabling the potential replacement of simple case management applications that do this.

As you'd expect this is all simple to do; so let's get started.

a) Kicking off a process with a geolocation passed from eDesigner

In release 1.10 of OpenProcess we illustrated (here) how to make a process capable of displaying a map. As you need a process that has already got this it is important that you first read this and add a geotag to your process. 

We've created a process Pothole Report that has a geotag field already and the code for this is Pothole.

Now we've done this we need to link our Pothole Reporting form to OpenProcess as we would do normally i.e. by adding an action to the form in System Management:

Important

Remember - as I made this mistake whilst writing the release notes! - if you select 'Customer account is mandatory' a process will only be created if the form is completed inside OneVu. If you want it to be completed outside of OneVu as well this should not be checked.

So now we've got a process that is capable of receiving a location and we've linked our Pothole Reporting form to the process for Pothole Reports.

Now we need to link the map that is capturing the report location to the geotag we created for our process - so open your form:

And in designer mode add a map using Add item or click the edit button to edit the existing map. When you're in this screen you'll see at the bottom there is a new 'Map to a key information field in OpenProcess' for the map function:

What you can also see is that we have given the Field Id the same name as the Geotag from OpenProcess. By doing this we are saying that when the location is recorded in this form it should be mapped to open process and displayed in a map within there. We have now just built the ability (without code) to add a map, link it to a process and put that location onto the map for a user to see in OpenProcess.

The following shows completing the form and identifying the location:

This shows the same location when the process is opened in the Fields tab of OpenProcess:

Cool right?

b)Configuring a process to be pulled into an eDesigner map

The point of this is to enable processes of a certain type to be shown as outstanding on a map where someone is reporting issues. To do this it is very simple.

You simply need to set a code in a new process setting here:

Important

This code needs to be the same in both the TEST and LIVE process as the online form that pull the info back will have the same code in dev/test/live. So we would recommend for the purposes of using this new functionality you use brand new processes.

c) Setting your form to retrieve known issues

Now we've got our form sending issues to OpenProcess, what we want to do now is get it show issues that are already known about and still open in OpenProcess.

To do this you need to link the process code set in b) within eDesigner. This is shown below:

You can see that when you click the 'Get locations from OpenProcess' option you're able to:

a) select a radius to look for OpenProcess locations

b) see a list of processes already linked (obviously this will be blank the first time you go to it)

c) see the list of process codes (and thus processes) that have the ability to be shown

So the process is to select a process code from the drop down and then click the 'Add a process' type link. The instant you do this when you come out to report another pothole at a different location from the original that was submitted you can see it:

You also have the ability to link multiple other process types, say if you were building a generic 'Report it' style form. So here we have linked Potholes and Fly tipping incidents:

Now if we zoom out a little we can see the fly tipping incidents added in other locations around London:

So you know have the ability to capture location based incidents of any type using a map and show already known issues of any type on the map to prevent duplicate reports too.

We hope you like it.

Enabling maps

To get the key is to create a Bing Maps (free) developer account:

https://www.bingmapsportal.com/

This will enable a basic API key to be retrieved. This allows 125,000 look ups per annum and is more than a council will need.

The key is found here once done:

There is just one setting that are needed to make this work, which is your Bing Maps API key.  More details on the creation of the API Key will be provided shortly.

2. Payment Integration and VAT - Capita