Working with issues

Once an issue exists, the work is keeping it accurate and moving it along. The panel on the right has three views: Details for the selected issue, Conversation for its discussion, and All issues for the whole register.

The Details view

Selecting a pin, or opening an issue from the list, shows the full record:

• The photographs, with the current status shown on them. Click one to view it at full size, including the original upload rather than the reduced copy. See below for adding more.
• The Issue ID — six characters, assigned automatically and never changing. Copy @mention puts it on the clipboard ready to paste into a conversation. See Classifying issues for what it is for.
• Name, Nearest Address, Asset type, Issue category, Asset ID, Status, Logged on site by and Description, all editable if your role allows it.
• Date logged, which is read-only — see below.
• Ownership — who is responsible for the issue now, and any offer waiting to be answered.
• Location, which can be expanded for the coordinates read from the photo in WGS84 and NZTM, the ground elevation where available, and Street View.

Edits are not saved as you type. Change what you need and use Save issue; the button stays inactive until something has actually changed, and an Unsaved changes note appears while a change is still pending. Changes to the name appear on the map label immediately so you can see what you are affecting.

Status is the exception — it saves the moment you choose it, without waiting for Save issue. Marking something resolved is a decision rather than a correction, and it used to sit behind an unpressed button while the map still showed the old colour.

If your role cannot edit issues, the fields are shown but locked, and a note at the top of the panel says so rather than letting you type into something that will be refused when you save.

Every saved change is recorded in the audit trail with your user and a timestamp.

Adding more photographs

One photograph is rarely the whole story of a fault. The wide shot that carried the GPS fix says where it is; the close-up taken a moment later says what is actually wrong with it; and a picture of the finished repair is what closes the argument about whether the work was done.

Add photo under the picture takes as many as you like, and you can select several files at once. They are added straight away — there is no Save to press.

Two things are different from creating an issue:

• No GPS is needed. The issue already has its position from the photograph it was created from, and nothing you add here can move the pin. A photo taken back at the depot, or on a phone with location services off, is accepted.
• The date logged does not change. It stays the capture time of the photograph the issue was created from. Each photo keeps its own capture time, shown when you hover over its thumbnail.

Once an issue has more than one photograph, a strip of thumbnails appears under the main picture and a counter shows which one you are looking at. Click a thumbnail to bring it up, or open any of them full size and step between them with the arrow keys or the arrows on either side.

The first photograph stays the issue's own — it is the one on the map pin, in the All issues list and in the map popup — so the picture that identifies the issue does not change under you when somebody adds a detail shot.

Each photograph added is recorded on the issue's timeline with who added it and when. Adding photographs needs a role that can upload; the same roles that can create an issue can add to one.

Statuses

The distinction between Resolved and Closed is worth keeping. Resolved is the contractor's or field team's view that the job is done; Closed is the acknowledgement that it has been checked and accepted. Collapsing the two loses the inspection step, which is usually the one people later ask about.

When you change a status, add a note saying why. A status that changes with no explanation is the most common source of confusion on a shared register.

Classification

Both the Asset type and the Issue category can be corrected at any time, and doing so is normal — plenty of issues arrive with one or both unset and get sorted out once somebody has looked properly. Filtering the All issues list for Not set on either axis is the quickest way to find them.

The two lists, how to add a value of your own, and what the Asset ID is for are all on Classifying issues.

Who logged it, and who uploaded it

Two different people, more often than not. A drive-over is done by one person and the folder of photographs is dropped in by another, so the panel records both:

• Logged on site by — who was there. Editable, because it is a statement about the world and somebody may have got it wrong.
• Uploaded by — who created the record. Not editable: it is an audit fact about what the system did.

Every issue currently in the register was logged by Niall on the 6 August drive-over, and imported under a different account.

The date logged

Read-only, and taken from the photograph's own capture time.

It used to be an editable date box filled in from the photograph, which made a fact into an opinion — two people could disagree about when a fault was seen, and the register had no way to say which was right. The camera already knows, so there is nothing to edit. If a photograph carries no capture time, the field reads No date in the photograph rather than guessing.

Archiving an issue

As the register grows, not everything needs to be on the map every day. Archive issue at the bottom of the Details panel clears an issue off the map and out of the All issues list.

Nothing is deleted. The photographs, the conversation, the ownership history and the issue ID are all kept exactly as they were, and Restore to register puts it back whole. Archiving is recorded on the issue's timeline, so the next person to open it can see why it dropped out of view.

To see archived issues, tick Archived in the All issues filters. They are listed faded, with an Archived tag.

Archiving is not the same as the Closed status. Closed says the work is finished; archived says nobody needs to look at it today. A closed issue still being invoiced belongs on the register, and an open issue on a stretch of road that has been handed back does not.

Merged issues

When the same fault has been recorded twice — two photographs taken a few paces apart, so two pins a couple of metres from each other — the two can be merged into one from the map. Shift-click both pins and use the bar that appears; the full instructions are on The map.

What you see afterwards in this panel:

• On the issue that was kept — the photographs and conversation of the other one, and a line naming what was merged in.
• On the issue that was merged — a note saying which issue it went into, with a link across to it. The record is archived and empty of photographs, because they are now on the other issue. It is kept so that its issue ID, which may have been quoted somewhere outside Huntly Faults Register, still leads somewhere.

A merged issue cannot be restored to the register or archived again, and no more photographs can be added to it — everything about it now belongs to the issue it was merged into.

The conversation

The Conversation view is the issue's history and its discussion in one place. It starts with the photo upload and grows as people post. Each message shows when it was added, who added it and which organisation they are from. Status changes and other recorded activity appear in the same stream, so the record reads in order.

To start a thread, write in the box at the bottom and post it. Replies sit under the message they answer, so two separate matters on one issue stay separate. Type @ to mention someone — they get a notification. A thread can be marked resolved once it is settled, which keeps it in the record without leaving it looking open.

Messages can be up to 8,000 characters, so there is room to be specific. You can edit or remove your own messages; an edited message is marked as edited and a removed one leaves a placeholder, because the surrounding replies still have to make sense.

Nothing is silently overwritten. If you need to correct something you wrote earlier, replying to correct it is usually better than editing — that way the record shows both what was thought at the time and what was established later.

Good messages tend to answer one of these:

• What did you find when you looked?
• What did you do, and when?
• What is blocking the next step, and who is it waiting on?

Ownership

Every issue has the person who logged it, which never changes, and an owner, who is the person responsible for resolving it now.

Ownership moves by offer, not by assignment. Assign to… offers the issue to someone with a short message; nothing changes until they accept. They can accept or decline, and whoever made the offer can withdraw it. An unanswered offer expires. All of it is kept under Ownership history, so who was responsible at any point stays answerable later.

Offers, replies and mentions all raise a notification, shown on the bell in the header. Selecting one takes you straight to the issue it is about.

The All issues list

The All issues view lists every issue in the project, with a count in the tab label. For each issue it shows a thumbnail, the issue ID, the status, the asset type and issue category, the nearest address, the date logged, who logged it, who uploaded it, the current owner, and when it was last active.

Each card is washed with its pin's colour, following whichever axis the map is currently coloured by. It is a light tint rather than a block of colour: enough that a long scroll breaks into bands instead of reading as one undifferentiated column, without fighting the text on top of it.

The list can be narrowed:

• The search box filters on the issue ID, the Asset ID, name, address, asset type, issue category, status and person. An issue ID matches with or without a leading @, so one pasted out of a conversation finds its issue either way.
• The status chips filter by status, and each carries a count and the same colour the pin uses on the map. Choose more than one to combine them.
• All asset types and All issues filter each axis independently, and both show how many issues carry each value. Both offer Not set.
• Archived brings archived issues into the list; they are hidden by default.
• The sort menu reorders by recent activity, newest first, or name.

Two actions are available on each entry:

• Go to on map moves the map to the issue without changing what the panel is showing — useful for checking where something is while you work through the list.
• Open opens the full issue record.

Searching for an address

The address search in the header takes a street address, suggests matches as you type, and moves the map to the address you choose, marking the point. Use it when somebody reports a problem by address rather than by issue number: search the address, then look at what pins are already nearby before creating a duplicate.

The search finds addresses. It does not search issue names or descriptions — for that, use the search in the timeline view.