Avoiding Creating Duplicates
- Steve Peregrine
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Avoiding Creating Duplicate Objects
Warning - following on from Creating New Inspections of Existing Assets.
In WinCan VX, a line in the grid view is a pipe or other object. It is NOT an inspection. A section can have as many inspections as you like and from either end.
The direction of the CCTV survey has no relationship with the section. The section (or lateral) is just a pipe in the ground.
The column on the right hand side of the grid view with the two magnifying glasses at the top shows you how many inspections there are of this object, and if the field is blank, then there is 1 or no inspections of the asset.
If you ignore all of the above advice and carry on regardless with creating duplicate assets, then when you enter the header data and click on the save button at the bottom, you will be prompted with this pop up warning:
Warning 1.
This is the first warning that you will receive and it does not take ant consideration for the inspection direction, so just because the last inspection was downstream and this one is upstream, this makes no difference at all to the fact that you have created a duplicate pipe with the same Supplier’s Reference and the same upstream and downstream nodes.
If you wish, you can click ‘Yes’ and you can proceed, but it is NOT recommended. You will now be prompted with this pop up message:
Warning 2.
This is your second chance to undo the problems that you are about to create in the data. You can again click on ‘Yes’ if you wish, but this is NOT RECOMMENDED even more strongly than the text just above.
If you continue without following the prescribed process for creating multiple inspections of assets, then you will see something like this in the section/lateral/node grid views - this is what we do not want to see in the data:
Poor inspection management with duplicate asset IDs.
See now that we have two pipes in the section grid with the same Supplier’s Reference MH1.1. The knock-on affect of this error is that this pipe will never be rendered in WinCan Map because Map does not know which object to draw and will cause all kinds of validation errors.
If we follow the process correctly and create 2 inspections of the asset, then the result in the grid view will look like this:
Good inspection management.
Notice that there is now only one asset record (because there is only one pipe in the ground) with a unique asset reference ID (MH1.1), and that in the column on the right there are 2 inspections of this asset.
Now we have created 2 (or more) inspections of an asset each with their own videos, observation codes and photos, we can review the inspections using the inspection list in the centre of the screen here:
Inspection selection.
When you click on the the button in the top left of the lower grid view area, you can see the details of all inspections of the currently selected asset. These include:
The Job Number (Catchment ID) that the inspection is attached to.
The inspection date.
The inspection time.
The inspection direction.
Whether the inspection was completed or abandoned.
Selecting an inspection in this list will take you to the details, video and observations for that inspection.
The default view in WinCan VX for all instances of multiple inspections is that the most recent inspection is always the one that is displayed on screen.
Duplicates Finder
Throughout HADDMS data processing and site data entry, it is important to keep a close eye on duplicets in sections lateral and nodes at all times and resolve as required.
In Wincan VX, we have a Duplicates Finder tool here:
Once launched, you can select which group of objects you wish to search for duplicates on using the dropdown list on the lower left corner:
Select the objects that you wish to check for duplicates.
When checked, this option will find a duplicate pipe where one is a section and the other is a lateral. When it is not checked, the object type will be ignored in the duplicate search. Also applies to nodes.
‘Find’ - click this to reveal duplicate objects as sepcified in previous steps.
When you have a list of duplicated objects, you can expand the list to see the individual items. Double clicking on an object in this list will jump the Wincan VX grid view to that object. Pay particular attention to the US and DS Nodes, because if the DS Nodes are different, then maybe these are genuinely 2 different objects, so perhaps you should edit the Supp Ref so thar they are no longer duplicated.
Click this button to automatically resolve all found duplicates - this will turn 2 duplicated objects into a single object with 2 inspections, so take care with step 4 above before clicking this button. If you do not take action on step 4, then you are likely to mess up your data.
Click here to only resolve th eobjects where you have explicitley made a selection in the ‘Keep’ checkbox above.
Step 4 in this process is very important - it is stronly advised to first order your objects alphabetically in the section/lateral/node grids before searching for duplicates, because when you double click on an object in the Duplicates Finder and VX jumps to them in the grid view, the duplicated items will be grouped together, regardless of their database row numbers. Look carefull at the upsteram and downstream node IDs to establish if this duplicate really is a duplicate or whether the ID of the object needs to be edited to fix your data.
Beware of hidden duplicates that the Duplicates Finder cannot find - examples might be MH1X and MH1.1 created by older or newer versions of WinCan VX where both objects are the same but the PLR Suffix (now obsolete) is different. These must be controlled and handled manually.