Reporting Options Added to Staff Web Pages

We have added some basic reporting options to the Staff web sites. From the main web page you can choose the "Reports" option to move to a page that will offer reports for the Building, Zoning, Violations and Housing databases. More databases will be added later. The report screens function somewhat similar to what you are used to in the Windows interface but do not have near as many options. You can select a Date field and date range that determine which records are included. Each screen has a "Basic" and "Summary" report option. We can add more report choices as the need presents itself. When you print the pages, portions of the screen are hidden so that the reports look like reports instead of screen prints. Give it a try and give us some feedback.

Upgraded Google Maps in Staff Web Pages

Each ZP SQL customers Staff web site now uses upgraded Google maps in most instances. The primary advantage is that now the Street View option is available for these maps. If you have not used this feature before, you'll see a little person icon in the upper right corner. You can drag that icon onto a street that the Google team has photographed and see pictures of all the buildings around you. You can move around in the interface and see a 360 degree photographic representation of the street. It's pretty cool. Of course, not every area has been photographed yet so your results will vary accordingly.

Verifying SQL Inserts

There is a new option you can turn on or off in the Global Personalization screen that will "Verify SQL Insert when Adding Records". If this option is turned on, the program will check to make sure the new record has been added successfully before continuing. If the Add action fails, you are left in edit mode and either have to Save again or Cancel. An "ERR_INSERT" text message is created in the main ZPSQL folder as well. This new option should only be used for troubleshooting as it does cause an extra SQL call to the internet each time you add a record to an application database. All of the application databases have been updated to support this new option. The downloads are available now.

Occupant Mismatches Web Page

This post is a follow-up to my November 7th post. I decided to add another page to the Staff web site Contact File maintenance section. This one shows any Contact records that are listed as the "Occupant" of a property but whose Contact street address does not match the street address of the property they occupy. In the previous post I advocated using an Advanced Filter to review these same records. Now there is a web page that does it for you.

Removing Duplicate Contact File Records

I just added two cool new options to the Staff web site that can help eliminated wasteful duplicate records in the Contact File database. You can access the new pages from the Contact Search option and then going to the Contact Maintenance page. The new options attempt to find existing duplicate records in the Contact File database by showing the most frequently repeated street addresses and the most frequently repeated names. Using either of these lists as a starting point you can select duplicate records and merge them together so that only one Contact File record remains but the links are preserved. To better explain how to use these new pages and the Contact File Upkeep option in the Window interface I've also added a new tutorial "Contact File Maintenance In ZonePro SQL" to our web site. It is a riveting piece of non-fiction that I highly recommend adding to your reading list.

Web Site Linking Follow-Up

To expand on my last post, we've added special pages to the Staff web site that make it easy to link to specific property records by passing either a parcel number or Property ID. An example parcel pass would look like this: www.zpdemo.zpuser.com/work/linkparcel.aspx?parcel=500-12-003. We also added an extra parameter that lets you link specifically to our mapping page, our driving directions page, or the page that tags neighbors with a certain radius. An example link for directions would be: www.zpdemo.zpuser.com/work/linkparcel.aspx?parcel=500-12-003&link=directions. A new tutorial is available on our web site called "How To Link To ZonePro SQL Web Sites" that explains this option further.

Linking to Web Sites Via Parcel Number

Had an interesting talk with a GIS company yesterday. They wanted our mutual customer to be able to display ZonePro data for a particular property record from within their GIS interface. The solution we agreed on was that the GIS program would pass a parcel number to the Staff web site for that customer which in turn would bring up the matching ZonePro Property web page in an inset window of the GIS page. This kind of linking is very easy to with our web interface for ZP SQL. Basically we just created a special web page that captures the passed parcel number and then launches the appropriate property record page. This same technique can be used by other communities and third-party tools that would benefit from a link to ZonePro data.