The map

The map is the main view in Huntly Faults Register, with the layer controls on one side and issue details on the other.

The opening view

The map opens on a tilted three-dimensional view looking south-east down the corridor, framed so that every issue in the register fits on screen with a margin around it.

It is fitted to the issues rather than to a fixed centre and zoom, so the view follows the work: as the register grows along the corridor, the opening view widens to match instead of leaving new issues off the edge.

The tilt is there because the programme is a road corridor rather than a town. A flat overhead view of a thirteen-kilometre corridor is mostly paddock with a thin line of pins down the middle; tilting puts the roadway itself on screen.

The compass

Top right of the map. The needle points north — red end — and the ring beneath it squashes as the view tilts, so you can see how steep the current angle is at a glance. The number under the needle is the tilt in degrees.

It is interactive:

• Drag anywhere on it to rotate the map.
• Click N, E, S or W to swing round and look that way, keeping your current tilt.
• Double-click it to face north.
• Fit all returns to the opening view: every issue on screen, at the default tilt.
• 2D / 3D flattens the view to a plan and tilts it back again.

You can also tilt with two fingers on a trackpad, or by holding Ctrl and dragging.

Basemaps

Only one basemap is shown at a time. They are grouped by supplier.

LINZ (Land Information New Zealand):

• LINZ Aerial — aerial imagery. This is the default, and the most useful backdrop for identifying kerbs, drains, seals and fence lines.
• LINZ Topographic — the standard topographic map.
• LINZ Topo Lite — a lighter topographic style, easier to read when you have overlays or a lot of pins on top.

Google:

• Google Roadmap — street map, best for street names and addresses.
• Google Satellite — satellite imagery, sometimes a different capture date from the LINZ aerial.
• Google Terrain — shaded relief, useful for understanding slope and drainage.

Comparing two imagery layers is a practical way to date a change: if a feature appears in one aerial capture and not the other, you have narrowed down when it happened.

A basemap that the deployment has no API key for is shown but cannot be selected, with a note naming the missing key. That is a configuration matter for whoever runs the deployment, not something you can fix from the browser.

Overlays

Overlays draw on top of whichever basemap is selected, and more than one can be on at once.

• LINZ Primary Parcels — property boundaries from the LINZ Data Service, drawn as outlines. Use it to judge whether an issue sits inside the road reserve or on private land. Parcel boundaries are a cadastral record, not a survey of what is physically on the ground, so treat them as indicative.
• Issues / pins — your project's issues. Turning it off temporarily clears the map so you can look at the underlying imagery.

Issue density

Issue density in the Overlays list shades the map by how many issues are clustered together, warming from blue through green to amber and red where the register piles up. It is drawn underneath the pins, and it is transparent where there is nothing, so the aerial still reads through it.

There is no colour key for it on purpose. It answers "where is the work concentrated" as a shape, and a heatmap that needs a legend to be read is not earning its place.

Issue pins

Each issue is a circle on the map with the issue name beneath it, coloured by its status:

That means a glance at the map tells you where the outstanding work is. The same colours, with a count for each status, are listed under Legend in the layer panel and on the filter chips in the All issues list.

Pins for issues you have queued but not yet saved are drawn smaller and in a pale grey, so you can see at a glance which observations are still drafts.

The selected pin is ringed in white so you do not lose it while panning. It is a ring rather than a filled circle, so the pin's status colour stays readable while it is selected.

Pin colours

Colour pins by in the Issue types panel offers three choices:

• Asset type — the default, and the one most people want. Twelve colours, one per type, with the type also written under each pin.
• Issue category — colours by the fault instead. Worth knowing that most of the register is Damaged, so this paints a largely single-colour map; it comes into its own when you have filtered down to one asset type.
• Status — Open, In progress, Resolved and Closed, which is the supervisor's view of the same map.

The key below the chips always shows the axis actually being painted, so the colours on screen and the colours in the legend cannot disagree.

Showing and hiding asset types

The same list of asset types is also a set of tick boxes. Untick one and those pins leave the map; Hide all and Show all switch the lot. The count beside each type tells you how many issues carry it before you tick anything.

This is the fastest way to answer "what are all those pins?" — hide everything else and see what is left.

Unsaved draft pins are never hidden by this filter. A draft is the thing you are working on, and having it disappear mid-edit reads as data loss.

Selecting an issue

Clicking a pin selects it. Two things happen: a small summary popup opens on the map, and the issue details panel switches to that issue.

The popup is a quick read rather than the full record. It shows the issue name, the issue type, the date recorded on site if one is set, a short preview of the description or latest note, the NZTM coordinates, and a button that opens Street View at the pin.

For the complete record — the photo, every field, the ownership and the conversation — use the issue details panel.

Merging two issues

Sometimes one fault is on the map twice. A surveyor photographs a cracked kerb, steps back and photographs it again, and the two pictures carry GPS fixes a few metres apart — so the register gets two issues sitting almost on top of each other. Nothing in the coordinates can tell that apart from two genuinely separate faults on the same stretch of kerb. Only somebody looking at both photographs can, which is why merging is something you do rather than something that happens.

To merge:

1. Shift-click the first pin. A bar appears at the top of the map, and the pin is ringed in amber.
2. Shift-click the duplicate. The bar now lists both.
3. Choose which issue to keep — the first one you clicked is offered by default — and press Merge.

Ordinary clicking still selects and opens an issue as it always did; only shift-click gathers pins for a merge. You can shift-click a pin again to take it back out of the selection, remove one with the ✕ beside it, or press Escape to abandon the whole thing.

More than two can be merged at once if a fault ended up on the map three or four times. Press Clear to start again.

What a merge does

The issue you keep gains everything the others had:

• Their photographs move onto it, so one issue now carries the wide shot and the close-up together. They appear in the strip under the main photo — see Working with issues.
• Their conversation and history move with them, in order.
• Any @ references written to a merged issue follow it, so a link in a message from last month still lands on the live record.

Nothing is deleted. Each merged issue stays as a record of its own, archived and marked merged into the one you kept, with a link across to it. That is on purpose: an issue ID gets quoted in email, written on paper and read out on a roadside, and somebody looking one up afterwards needs to be told where it went rather than finding nothing.

A merge cannot be undone from the screen — restoring a merged issue would put an empty duplicate back on the map, so the panel does not offer it. If one was made in error, the photographs are all on the issue you kept and can be sorted out from there.

Two things are worth knowing before you merge:

• The description of a merged issue is quoted into the kept issue's conversation rather than pasted into its Description box, so nothing is lost and nothing is silently overwritten.
• Ownership stays where it was. If somebody has been offered one of these issues and has not answered yet, the merge is refused until that offer is settled — otherwise their question would be about a record they can no longer see.

Merging needs a role that can edit issues.

Photos to place

Photographs whose EXIF carried no position cannot be pinned automatically, so they wait in Photos to place at the bottom of the layer panel. This normally happens when a phone had location services off, or had not got a satellite fix yet — the first photo of a day is a common one.

Each entry shows the photograph, and the asset type and comment recorded for it in the field, recovered from the surveyor's spreadsheet. To place one:

1. Press Place on map on the photograph.
2. Click the map where it belongs. The cursor becomes a crosshair and a banner across the top of the map says which photograph you are placing.

The issue is created there with its asset type, issue category and comment already filled in, and the photograph leaves the queue. Its date logged still comes from the photograph, because the camera recorded the time even though it did not record the place.

Press Cancel in the banner if you change your mind before clicking.

Navigating

• Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, and use the zoom buttons on the map.
• A metric scale bar is shown on the map. It updates as you zoom, so you can judge distances directly, which is important when a defect is described as being a certain number of metres from a feature.
• Attribution for the current basemap is shown in a compact control on the map. It expands when you click it.
• The address search in the header moves the map to a matched address and marks the point. See Working with issues for how to use it alongside the issue list.
• The Go to on map action in the All issues list flies the map to that issue, which is quicker than hunting for a pin.

Small screens

On a phone or a narrow window the side panels collapse behind toggles so the map keeps the full width. Open the layer controls or the issue details panel when you need them and close them again to get the map back. On large screens the issue details panel can be dragged wider or narrower, and the width is remembered.

When a basemap will not load

If a Google basemap cannot be reached — usually a key, billing or API restriction problem in the underlying Google project — Huntly Faults Register switches back to a LINZ basemap and shows a short notice rather than leaving you with an empty canvas. See Troubleshooting for what to check.