Christmas Wish List

I'm compiling ideas and suggestions for the next release of ZonePro. If you have any new features you'd like to see please let me know. While I can't promise every suggestion will make it in, it never hurts to voice your opinion. I'm hoping for a new release in late January.

Orphan Hunter Script

I have added a new script to the Downloads page of our customer support web site. The script is called the Orphan Hunter and it is designed to find permit records that no longer match up with a property record. In theory permit records that don't have a matching property record should not exist in ZonePro. It would take some very unusual circumstance for this to happen. It's a problem that I have to deal with because I am constantly copying in various databaes from various customers to look at their data. This mish mash of databases creates all kinds of orphans. In a customer environment, however, it is unlikely that you will ever need this script. If you suspect that you have orphaned records you can try the script and no harm will be done.

Handling Complaints and Violations

I've had a couple of conversations recently regarding better ways to differeniate between complaints and violations in the Violations database. The idea being that the you can use the Violations database to enter complaints but any given complaint may or may not be elevated to a violation in the future. For reporting purposes we need an easy way to tell one from the other. The solution I am proposing has several parts. First we will add a "Violation Date" field to the Violation database. The "Enter Date" field is filled in when the complaint record is created but the "Violation Date" stays blank until the case is elevated. We'll add that field to the date options in the report screen to make it easy to base reports on its value. Another enhancement will be the option to have ZonePro assign a Violation Number after the record is created. The idea is that if the record is just a complaint you would blank out the Violation Number when the record is created. If the record is later elevated to a violation you will be able to right-click on the blank Violation Number field and ZonePro will assign the next available number to it. So a complaint record would have a blank Violation Number and Violation Date field, and a violation record would have these values filled. This gives users a number of ways to report on just the desired group. The final changes we'll make will be to the report screen. I plan to add the Status field as a standard report filter on the screen. This will give yet another way of easily distinguishing between different kinds of violation records. That's the plan for now. If you have any input you wish to give on this issue please drop me a line.