1 acre box, map element

[jgr826]

Admin,
A lot of our work deals with human remains recovery. Ideally we assign our HR teams to one or more 1 acre sectors. One thing that would help would be a map tool that draws a 1 acre box in the map tab. Maybe make the 'box' size defined by the user.

Let me know what ya'all think.

Jess Romero
www.searchone.org

[Radishworks]

I will let other teams jump in if this is something they think would be useful.  For my two cents, it would take a fair amount of work to add a new map element type, each new type takes quite a bit of coding.  From someone who has worked on many, many HR missions, I'm not sure how useful any size "squares" would be.  Search areas are rarely defined as such a uniform geometric shape, more often they are defined by roads, trails, geographic features, etc.  I always found watching the area of the object being drawn in the lower left of the map screen useful when drawing a more free form area.

[jgr826]

We've managed searches as you've described. But we've also had cases (cold/buried cases with multiple teams) where assigning 1 acre chunks facilitates the search, as shown in the attachment. Not a big deal if this feature is found not as useful as I thought.

[Radishworks]

Jess,

Thanks for the posted picture and the PM.  We were thinking the same thing when it comes to a "Duplicate" solution. 

MM now has a "Duplicate Area" feature.  (May need the typical F5).  It works like this:

• Draw a Area on the map, in your case it can be square, watch the lower left of the maps screen and you'll see the area acreage.
  
  
• Click on the line part of the Area, this will open a popup bubble for the area.
  
  
• Use the new Left, Right, Up and Down buttons in the bubble to duplicate the area.
  
  
• The duplication will happen in relation to the last element copied, so if you duplicate in a zig-zag, you can quickly create a grid of squares like is shown in your posted picture.
  
  

Lastly I will mention the existing feature of holding down the Alt key when in map edit mode, this will allow you to move a whole area element around rather than corner by corner.

Hope this solves your need!

[jgr826]

Cool! That totally works.
Thanks for the quick work.
Admin rocks as always.