The register on the handset

The asset register, read and — for some roles — written to, from wherever the asset actually is.

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Three views, one screen

A flat list, ordered by asset number and searchable — what you want when you already know what you’re looking for, and the view this opens on. A tree, following your sites, rooms and bays down to the assets standing in them and the assets built out of those. What you want when you don’t know what you’re looking for: “what’s in Bay 3” is not something a search box answers. A selection. Tick rows in the tree and tell all of them to do something at once — ticking a bay stands for every asset under it, at any depth. Everybody who can open this app can see the register. Adding to it and acting on a selection belong to roles that hold the asset edit permission, so most technicians get a register they can look at, with the add button and the action bar simply absent rather than present and refusing.

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Adding an asset

Add an asset, from Home or from an unrecognised scan, asks the same questions the desktop’s asset form does — the same fields, labels, hints and required marks, because it’s built from your organisation’s own asset form rather than a fixed list somebody typed into this app. What it can’t honestly ask, it says so rather than hiding the question: the owner, maintenance owner and custodian pickers need a directory this device doesn’t carry, and a tenant field of a type the handset can’t answer — a closed list with no options synced, say — is named rather than silently dropped. Two things this screen asks that the desktop form doesn’t:

• Where it is, with a button that takes a location fix rather than a map — useful standing in front of a pole or a pump house that has never had a coordinate.
• What it looks like, with the camera. Photographs are asked for in their own section and as the answer to any photo, image or signature question your organisation configured — see photographs for how they queue.

The asset appears on the register straight away, marked Not sent until the server has taken it — it can’t yet be moved, ticked into a selection, or given a parent, because the row itself doesn’t exist on the server yet.

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Acting on a selection

Tick assets in the tree and choose one of five things to do to all of them: Each asset in the selection is its own queued operation rather than one call covering all of them, so one refusal in a selection of forty doesn’t take the other thirty-nine with it — the Sync screen shows forty rows, each retryable on its own.