New Tip For Handling The Street Extra Field

I've had a couple of requests lately concerning the best way to include the Street Extra field in the middle of a location expression when printing permits and other documents. The trick is in eliminating extra spaces when the Street Extra field is blank. I've posted my answer in the Tips & Tricks page of our web site. Look under the "Document Editor Tricks" topic.

Violation Lag Report Posted

We have a customer who is trying to calculate the average number of days it takes to resolve violations in their community. The simple version of this report would just subtract the Comply Date field from the Enter Date to get the number of days that have lapsed and then calculate an average in the report summary. It gets tricky however because you do not want to average in those records that have not yet complied. The solution is to use a report variable to keep a count of complied records and another variable to keep a running total of the number of lapsed days. Then at the end of the report you use these two variable to calculate the average number of days. A report called "Lag" has been posted to the Downloads section of our web page that demonstrates how this technique works. You can download and use this report as is or customize for your specific needs. This same approach could be used for other types of lag reporting such as the number of days between the issuance of a permit and when the project is finalized (this time subtracting the Occupy Date from the Permit Date).

Cool Custom Applicatons

For some time now we've had the ability to write custom database applications for our customers and integrate them in to ZonePro. I'll describe a few of the ones we have done so far. We wrote a Business Licensing application for a customer that helps them administer annual fees to commercial properties. It has a special report screen for generating the annual invoices and licenses. For another customer we wrote a Deposit Log application that they use to keep track of when fees were deposited in the bank. The most recent custom application we wrote is one that automates the use of ZP4 program from within ZonePro. ZP4 is a program I wrote about earlier in this blog that adds the plus 4 zip code to addresses. The interface allows you automatically feed the property location addressses or owner addresses to the ZP4 program. In return you get the plus 4 zip code and a mailing barcode that you can save in ZonePro. The final custom application I'll mention is a School Capacity program. We wrote this application for a county that is issuing a Capacity permit for every new home built that charges a fee if the local elementary, middle or high school exceeds its student capacity. The program calculates the capacity based on the rates entered in a maintenance database and the number of permits that already been issued for each school. As you can tell from the above, there are a variety of new things that you can do with the ZonePro custom option. Let me know if you want to learn more about one of the applications mentioned or have an idea for something that could help your community.

New Release Out This Month

Newsletters went out today announcing the latest release of ZonePro. A lot of the features we're touting this time around have already been discussed in posts to this blog. The one new feature I think will appeal to the most customers is the ability to jump from the report screens directly to the permit screens. When you browse records in a report screen you can now highlight a permt, press CTRL-J and you will jump to that permit screen. Basically this lets you use the report screens as fancy locate screens. It will also be useful when something shows up in a report that you don't think belongs because you jump right to the offending record to check it out. As always, please contact us to request the new release if you are ready for it.