LocalMaps How-to-videos - LIM Reporting, working with Tables, creating title pages and more...

LaurenMcArtney · ‎03-11-2021

Kia Ora LocalMaps Community!

So we have been a bit busy since the 2.3.1 release! Planning for the next year and beyond (you have lots to look forward to so stay tuned). Hopefully many of you will have seen and submitted answers to our recent Integration Survey where we were asking for feedback on what systems you might see benefit in Integrating with LocalMaps. If you haven't had this sent to you, please touch base with me and I will make sure you can get your vote in!

Integration aside, lets talk Reporting. Since 2.3.1 was released we have had a some great opportunities to work with many of you on how LocalMaps can be used for some more complex reporting needs. You guys are pushing the limits and we want to help you get there. From this, we thought it might be useful to extend some examples as well as tips and tricks on LocalMaps reporting to the wider Community! This has come from some recent work we did with Napier City Council around converting an existing LIM report process into a LocalMaps Report for users to generate themselves.

Now before we crack into that, we need to introduce a new face around here - @JoshGore! Some of you may have worked with Josh already but he recently has joined us as a GIS Developer in the LocalMaps Product Team - and he has been very busy already! In fact, Josh has been leading a lot of work around reporting improvements and configuration needs with customers.

Instead of writing this all out in a long winded blog post, we have some much more interesting videos! Josh has kindly put together some "How-to" videos covering some useful concepts such as LIM Reporting, working with Tables and creating title pages.

Huge thank you to the great team at Napier City Council for allowing us to share their report use case and show off what they have created for their users with LocalMaps. Check it out below!

Video: LIM Reporting Overview

(view in My Videos)

Video: LocalMaps Report Templates and Title Pages

(view in My Videos)

Video: LocalMaps Report Tables and Title elements

(view in My Videos)

Keep an eye on Geonet for more updates from the LocalMaps Team in the coming months. We are also collating the ideas you have put into Geonet so far for future versions of LocalMaps - some great thoughts out there! Remember to keep voting as we will be taking an audit of these shortly and sending out some more questions to help us make sure future versions of LocalMaps are fit for your workflows. Stay tuned!

Nga Mihi,

The LocalMaps Team

HelenRoulston_SelwynDC · ‎08-25-2021

Can this reporting also be used to generate a PIM where the reporting layer is effectively a dynamic click on the map? Rather than an existing feature in our database?

LIM's apply to the whole rating unit/valuation, whereas PIM is for a point of interest within a property. We use PIM's to get memorandum information for a specific location, useful for building consent applications on large properties where only some areas will satisfy consent requirements.

LaurenMcArtney · ‎08-25-2021

Hey @HelenRoulston_SelwynDC - great question!

At this stage, LocalMaps is not configured to allow for this, but we can see the value this might have. Essentially the limitation currently is that we do use the feature to drive joins to features. We could look at this for future reporting though. It would mean a few tweaks to the reporting code and database but could allow the report to be tired to a location not necessarily a property.

So perhaps could look at something like a new tool that you could activate and then would put you in a new “mode” that would allow you to you click on an area and generate a report based on that click (as right now we rely on the popup from the feature to allow the user to generate the report)? Is that workflow something you could see working? Or if you have any further ideas of how you could see if from a user perspective that would be great!

HelenRoulston_SelwynDC · ‎08-26-2021

Hi Lauren,

Yes I think this workflow that would work. A few questions I have around it would be could the new tool be configured to use report templates set up in the reporting section in Admin? I guess you would need to be able to specify the new tool in place of the report layer? Anyway, I would really like to discuss this further :). And happy to share more details about use cases.