Printer Summary Option Improved

The "To Printer Summary" output option available in most report screens is really useful. It allows you to condense multi-page reports to just the relevant subtotals and totals. It eliminates all the detail lines and just shows the meat of a report. But in prior versions there was no way to preview a report in summary mode and no way to direct such a report to anything but the default printer. The most recent updates fix these shortcomings. Now when you select "To Printer Summary" and right-click on the Printer button you will see a preview of the summary version of the report instead of the full report. I have also changed the code so that when you left click on the Printer button with "To Printer Summary" chosen, you always get the printer prompt dialog so that you can direct the report to any printer. These two changes should make this option a lot more user friendly.

Staff Web Site Changes

I have a test version of a new web site up for the Staff web site at www.zpdemo.zpuser.com. I have changed the way the site keeps track of logged in users. The main problem I am trying to solve is having the ability to keep users logged into for long stretches of time. This new approach should keep you logged in as long as you do not close your browser. This should work better for inspectors in the field who want to stay logged in as they drive around. One of the side benefits of this new approach is that now we can show who is logged in at any given time. A new button called "Track Users" off the Main page shows a list of recent users. This change affected just about every page so I am testing it out on my demo site before moving it out to customers. Please let me know if you encounter any problems when using the site.

Special Script Allows for Time Box Customization

In several of the screens that track inspection you can launch a Time Clock box that lets you fill in the Inspection Time field by selecting a pre-defined value from a list. Recently a customer asked if there was a way to customize the time options offered in the Time Box list. Now you can by using a special script file. You can read more about this in our User Scripts Blog. You can also download the starter script (along with scripts to customize the Application Buttons on the Property Screen) by getting the Time_Clock_Script file and copying the script to your main installation folder. You can then edit the Time Clock list in the User Defined Scripts Screen.

Last Known Inspection in Combo Reports

An extra field has been added to those pulled by the Building Combination Reports screen. The field, MAXDATE, pulls the last known inspection date for each permit. This is useful information to compare with the Expire Date field to see if a building project is truly in progress. The MAXDATE is determined by looking at all of the Last Inspect fields for each given permit and selecting the most recent one. If no inspections are recorded for a permit the field will be NULL.

Notes Field Fix

I recently discovered an odd glitch. A problem in the communication between the Windows client and the SQL Database caused memo fields to be truncated to 8000 characters. Memo fields are the fields in ZonePro that do not have length restrictions such as the many Notes fields. It is very rare that anyone typed in more than 8000 characters which is why it took such a long time to discover that the problem even existed. I found a way around the communication glitch and now all updates of memo fields are once again unlimited. For now this only applies to updates or edits, not to inserts or adds. That means when you add a new record you should not immediately type more than 8000 characters into a Notes field. Instead, Save it first and then Edit the record to add your copious notes!

Adding and Subtracting from Date Field

ZP SQL handles dates differently than ZP 32. In ZP SQL all dates are stored in a long DATETIME format that includes both date information and time information. In ZP 32 all dates were stored a simple DATE format. If you want to perform calculations with dates in your ZP SQL reports or documents, you sometimes will need to convert the long DATETIME format to a simpler DATE format first. This is done with the function TTOD( ) - which stands for "Timestamp to Date." So if I want to add 30 days to the Violation Date my report expression would be: TTOD(vio_date) + 30.

Document Editor Text Block Video

I just created a short video that talks just about the process of creating and editing Text objects using the Document Editor. The Document Editor is one of the trickier tools to use in ZonePro so I figure every little tip helps.