Asbestos extension: an advanced customization of NavTable that provides an assisted data entering for the asbestos surfaces status of the Autonomous Province of Trento
Ultimate goal of the “Dati Amianto” project is to enable the APSS (Azienda Provinciale per Servizi Sanitari) of Trento for the gathering of the data coming from the in-place examination of the status of asbestos surfaces (identified via MIVIS scanning) of the provincial territory.
The surfaces to analyse and their attributes are contained within a single shapefile (APSS sheet), logically divided into smaller parts and sent to every in-charge person.
The developed extension is thus required to provide a suitable solution for the municipal technicians for the:
- displaying of the data contained in the received APSS sheet
- data entering (in an assisted manner)
- validation of the correctness of entered data (that potentially could have been edited by hand with every other GIS software)
- computation of two distinct scores (priority and deterioration) which depends on the entered values and are used by the APSS for the identification of the most dangerous asbestos surfaces
Moreover, a clear requirement of the extension to develop, was that the interface between the user and the data had to be a customization of NavTable extension.
In order to achieve the accomplished task we've initially investigated several gvSIG framework that provide a way of customizing NavTable extension, such as NavTableForms, EIEL extension but all of the found approaches (AT THE MOMENT OF THE ANALYSIS) were lacking in some important aspect required by the project, such as:
- field with domains managing and validation
- inter-field dependency (the value of some field is set when setting the value of another one)
- comfortable date chooser for date and numeric fields
- fields grouping (dividing available form in multiple tabs and subsections)
- tab and field enabling/disabling depending on the value of some other fields
- automatic form construction
- customizable way of scores computation once data entering has finished
- track that a feature has been validated
- online help
For all of these reason, we developed our custom implementation of NavTable subclassing the NavTableExtension and overriding the necessary methods. Moreover, all complex mechanisms described above and field domains are all contained in a easy configurable XML file whose syntax could be quite easily further customized (plus a Drools project for the scores computation) that automatically computes the form layout (thus skipping the annoying phase of designing custom forms via Abeille or whatever).
Quick development of custom NavTable forms with advanced features such as:
- field with domains managing and validation
- inter-field dependency (the value of some field is set when setting the value of another one)
- comfortable date chooser for date and numeric fields
- fields grouping (dividing available form in multiple tabs and subsections)
- tab and field enabling/disabling depending on the value of some other fields
- automatic form construction
- customizable way of scores computation once data entering has finished
- track that a feature has been validated
- online help
