Selecting and acting on items

Click an item to inspect it, gather several into a multi-selection, and act on the whole group.

Focusing versus selecting

A single click on a record, entity, or data source selects and focuses it: it opens that item's detail panel on the right. Hold Shift while clicking map features, grid cards, or tree rows to add or remove an item without changing the focused detail. With the Select tool active, drag a box on the map to select every record, entity, and data source inside it; hold Shift while starting the drag to add them to your existing selection. Map clusters remain navigation controls and are not selectable.

Closing a detail panel clears only the focus and leaves the selection intact. Press Escape when no selection drag is active to clear the selection.

A selection holds at most 500 items. A drag that would take you past that is refused whole — your existing selection stays as it was, and a message tells you how many items the drag covered. Zoom in or drag a smaller area to stay under the limit. Nothing is silently dropped, so what the panel lists is always exactly what you selected.

When more than one item is selected, the Selected Items panel appears on the right. It lists every kind in selection order, shows per-kind counts, and lets you open or remove individual items, clear the selection, create a workflow order from selected entities, or merge compatible selected entities. Actions that cannot use the current selection remain disabled with an explanation.

Detail panels

The detail panel opens on the right for a record, entity, or data source. From it you can view and edit the item's details, jump to related items, locate the item on the map, and — for a data source — open its recordings.

Use Open in Editor in a data source's actions menu to open it in the Assessment Editor with the dashboard's current date range. An entity's actions menu groups its editor links under Open in Editor into a Device section, a Subject section, or both, depending on how the entity is linked to data sources; an entity with no linked data source has no Open in Editor item. In a section, choose Default to let Highlighter arrange the editor, or choose a saved layout by name. Each link opens the editor in a new tab.

You can reach the same editor views from the Hierarchy panel. Right-click an entity, open Open in Editor, then choose Default or a saved layout. These links also carry the dashboard's current date range into the editor.

Create a workflow order

With entities selected, Create workflow order in the Selected Items panel opens a dialog that builds an order from the selection. Choose an Object Class and a Workflow, and optionally a Name. Only the selected entities of the chosen object class are added as cases, so a mixed selection is filtered down to the class you pick. See Managing Workflows for what happens to an order once it is created.

Because the panel needs more than one selected item, create an order for a single entity by selecting a second entity of a different object class alongside it and picking the first entity's object class in the dialog.

The cases are created as drafts, so no work starts straight away. Open the order from the workflow's Orders tab and click Mark Ready on a case, or Mark all ready, to release the cases into the workflow's steps — see Mark a Case Ready or Draft.

Merge entities

When two or more entities are really the same thing, Merge entities combines them. A survivor is auto-selected (you can change it); annotations on the other entities are reassigned to the survivor, and the non-survivor entities are deleted. No entity is renamed. Because the non-survivors are removed, review the survivor choice before confirming the merge.

Bulk actions from the Records Gallery

When you select records in the Records Gallery, open the ⋯ menu in the gallery's header (its tooltip reads Bulk actions) to add the selection to an existing workflow order or dataset. Each menu item says what it will act on: Add to Workflow Order (3 selected) for the records you selected, or Add all matching records to Workflow Order when every record matching the current query is selected. Add to Dataset is labelled the same way. With nothing selected, the items read just Add to Workflow Order and Add to Dataset and act on every record matching the current filters; the dialog warns you when no filters are applied, because that adds every record in the account.

For a workflow order, choose the destination from the searchable Workflow Order field and click Add to Order. Highlighter uses the workflow order's case-matching strategy to decide how the records are grouped into cases; this action does not create a new order or let you choose an individual case. A confirmation message reports how many cases were created.

Add to Dataset works the same way: choose the Dataset and click Add to Dataset. Its confirmation message reports how many submissions were added.

The menu also offers Bulk Download, which downloads the files matching the current filters.

Assign a parent entity

Entities can be organised into a hierarchy — for example, poles grouped under a site. With more than one entity selected, Edit entities opens a dialog whose Parent entity field moves every selected entity under the chosen parent. An entity that already has a parent is moved under the new one, together with its own descendants.

You can also drag a row in the hierarchy tree onto another entity to move it under that entity, or onto the panel's "Entities" header to remove its parent and move it back to the top level. If the dragged entity is part of the current selection, the whole selection moves with it. Targets that can't accept the drop — the entities' current parent, or the header when they have no parent — show no drop highlight. While dragging, a label next to the cursor describes what the drop would do (for example Move 2 entities under "Site A" or Remove parents). After the move, the hierarchy tree expands to reveal the moved entities and scrolls them into view.

To change or clear a single entity's parent instead, open its detail panel and edit the Parent field.

Cases

The Cases panel lists the cases relevant to the current data along with their status, so you can track and work through the items moving through your workflows without leaving the dashboard.