Smap version 14.03 has finally been released.  It should have been available from the end of March. The next release should be a small one and hopefully we can get back to the end of month regular release date.

The major new feature is forwarding of surveys.  Other changes are improvements to monitoring, support for larger result sets (paging) and a more laptop friendly deployment.

Monitoring

Totals

When you select “Monitoring” by default you will be shown total counts for success, errors, duplicates and “not uploaded”.

Totals are only available in Table view.  In order to view locations of uploaded data you need to first select the source as “Instances” then select “show as map”.

Filtering

You can filter the uploads (or forwards) that you view in the monitor page by their status. Success, errors, duplicates and “not uploaded”.  Hence you can uncheck all statuses except for “Error” in order to see which uploads in your project or survey were reported as being in error.  When showing instances rather than totals the last 200 records are still shown.  However if you apply a filter to only show errors then it will be the last 200 errors that are shown.

Paging

Paging is now available in the Monitoring screen and for the survey table view in the dashboard.  200 records are shown by default but you can then select a forward / reverse button to move forward and back through the results. These buttons are located at the top of the table and are labelled “>>>” for forward and “<<<” for back.  They will be disabled unless there are additional pages available to view.

Total Result Records

In the dashboard, when you view all survey results as a table, then the total count of surveys will be shown as well as the count of “bad” records. This wil be a faster way of getting a count of all surveys loaded than having to export to a spreadsheet.

Deployment

Changing URL of the server

Previously it was assumed that the address of the server would not change.  This allowed the server to get away with storing the full url of all survey attachments in the database.  However this assumption is completely untenable if Smap Server is deployed on laptops.  The server URL can now be changed and all the attachments will still be accessible.

Simplified deployment

Almost all the editing of files that had to be done during the installation process is now not needed.  The one exception is that the IP address of the server still has to be set in the install script.   This is only required for webForms and will hopefully be removed soon.  So, assuming you are installing on a clean Ubuntu machine, the new installation process is:

1. Download and extract the release
2. change directory to smap/install
3. Edit the install script to add the IP address (temporary)
4. Type ./install.sh

This will also now run the deploy script so once it finishes you shoulld be able to log on and use the server.

This release will be added to the downloads page over the coming weekend.  There will be another blog post to announce its availability.

Bug Fixes

1. Error in retrieving languages on the audit page fixed.  This bug prevented auditing.
2. If the first record in survey had an invalid geometry then export to shape files would fail. An example of an invalid geometry is recording only one point when a polygon or line was requested.