Populating landmarks for locations; 'Constituents' lookup behavior

[Ian M]

Hi all,

the tl;dr here is this: getting my install setup and tweaked for an upcoming running event. Much of it is off-road (i.e. without addresses/cross streets) on a very long course, and internally we use nearest mile or other waypoint for dispatching runs.  Ideally I'd like our loggers to be able to quickly enter said waypoint and get a new incident on the map without having to do a lot of scrolling/zooming placing a marker. Pretty common use case, and love to hear what solutions have worked for people.

After seeing another thread here from years back, I tried populating some lat/lon coordinates in Constituents entries and turning on the associated 'addr source' setting in config. It sorta works—to be searchable, the waypoint name (eg 'mile 5') needs to be in the 'address field of the table entry. In a New Incident, I can type it in the 'location fiel' and it'll come up as a radio button, but, when it's selected, the location jumps back to the default map coordinates.

The solution to that seems to be turning of reverse geocoding in config, but 1- I get an error popup (annoying, but doesn't impair the function) and 2- I lose the ability to set a location from a map click or look up an address, which I'd like to retain.

If anyone has a good solution to this implementation, I'm all ears. I'm not well-versed in either PHP nor MySQL, so not sure if there's something I can change here, but I could be walked through it...

 The alternative, if I can figure out a way to bulk import, is entering them all in as Facilities, but there's 50+ and would rather not clutter the map. 

Anyway, longtime lurker here but really appreciate the community and continued support of this very powerful software. I've been working this event for years, and while watching command staff painfully shuffle through post-its and pushpin maps, I've been tinkering with a Tickets project on the side. Last year I did a sort of live tabletop exercise as a demo, and it was such a hit I got the go-ahead for a full implementation this year. Perfect for what we need, so big thanks to the team.