Mapping Fire Hydrants in the Staff Site

I have just uploaded pages to the Custom section of the demo Staff web site that lets users map fire hydrants and keep track of them in a database. You can add hydrants visually using a map. You can look up a street address and find all the nearest fire hydrants. This is just a test system that I am working on for a customer but it is also a fun example of the kinds of things you can do with web-based data. You can play with the pages yourself by logging on at www.zpdemo.zpuser.com/staff and using the Dashboard from the Main page to go to Custom Options. From there you will see a menu of options for working with the fire hydrant maps and data.

Fire Inspection Count

Just added a new field to the Fire Inspection Screen to keep track of the number of inspections. The Inspection Count field fills a need if you wish to use the same record to keep track of re-inspections after the initial inspection has failed. This way you can reuse the Last Inspection and Next Inspection fields while still keeping track of the total number of inspections involved.

Delayed Permit Numbering

All of the application database screens that have permit number, application number, or case numbers now support a delayed permit numbering option. This means you can create a new permit record and intentionally leave the permit number field blank. At a later time you can come back and edit this record, right-click on the Permit Number field and the system will prompt you to see if you want to generate a new number for the record. Saying yes will generate the next number is sequence for that database. This is a very useful option if you wish to enter permit records in advance but will not actually issue the permit until a later date.

Fire Hydrant Inventory

I'm working on a really interesting project right now that spun out of the mapping options in the Staff web interface for ZP SQL. I have a customer who wanted to know if we could add a database for fire hydrants and then map those as well. The prototype pages are in testing right now but the site allows you to enter any address and then shows a map of the closest fire hydrants to that property. The fire hydrant database contains Latitude and Longitude fields just like our property database does. In this case though, the customer has to supply the values for those fields because we can't geocode them the way we can an address. Fortunately, inexpensive GPS units make it fairly easy to construct your own database of positional coordinates. One of the bits of code I had to develop for this exercise is a way to determine distance between two geocoded points. This is used to find the nearest fire hydrants in this site but will be very useful for distance calculations in other web-based scenarios too.