Table of Contents

Progressive Web App

Vision 42 ® is a progressive web app. This means it can be installed on your pc, smartphone, and tablet. Installed apps have these benefits:

• They run separately from the browser.

• Links, in messages for example, can be opened with the installed app. This avoids the clutter of many open browser tabs.

• Files can be directly opened with your app through the operating system.

• The app icons can have badges indicating progress or errors.

• Shortcuts can be used, through the app icon.

• The window title bar can function as the header menu, thus saving screen estate.

State engine

Vision 42 keeps track of its internal state and even unlocks the state through its URL. This results in some powerful features:

• Go back and forth using the history buttons.

• Share something with another user, using any email or chat application.

• Make bookmarks inside the app.

• Reload without having to navigate, click, and type back to where you were.

Always up-to-date

When necessary, any visible information in the app will be automatically refreshed, after 15 seconds at most. This refresh will be delayed for elements the user is interacting with. For most elements, the focus will be used to determine this. For instance, a cursor in an editable input field will pause refreshing. For maps, this is an open plot window. Mind that it is not easy to keep all information up-to-date and to never disturb the user in the process.

Sign in

QA environment

If you do not want to pollute the production environment with test data, you can use the QA environment at https://vision42.net/qa/your-organization/ (Quality Assurance). Note that data in QA will be overwritten daily by production data.

In QA, you can try things out with impunity. This is especially useful for new project files or for trying out new data formats. Large reports can be run in this QA-environment, without impact on production performance.

Password managers

Vision 42 deliberately integrates well with password managers. We strongly advise to fully make use of a password manager. It can generate a strong random password, which it will remember and even fill in for you. Many password managers can even function across devices. A quick start is to use the Google Password Manager that is built into our recommended browser, Google Chrome.

Persistence

Signing in will persist until the local storage is cleared by the browser. This is a deliberate choice of a large convenience gain over a tiny security loss.

We strongly advise against signing in on a public or untrusted device. Should you do so anyhow, make sure to sign out. Closing the Vision 42 tab or window will not sign you out.

Organization section

Overview

This section lets you manage the organization structure and the users of the app. It is geared towards administrators, while regular users can view and browse the information. Out of privacy considerations, this section is not available for guests.

It is divided into three parts:

• A representation of the organization structure.

• A Users section.

• A Departments section.

In the structure graph you can select a department.

• The users linked to this department will be shown in the Users section.

• The administrators of a department are shown when hovering over the department in the graph.

• If you are an administrator in this department, you can link existing users to it.

Creating new users

New users are first created without a department:

• Go to the empty department, depicted by a empty circle.

• Add the user info at the bottom:

  • Name.

  • Identification; preferably the email address.

  • Administrator flag.

  • Create the user by clicking the plus icon.

• Next select the department the user belongs to and link the user to it.

Email, notifications, channels, and SMS

The identification field controls how messages will be sent to a user:

• A regular email address is recommended, for most use cases. Email can have attachments, which the upload message and the inclinometer review message make use of. Note that email from Vision 42 is being monitored and protected from eavesdropping and impersonation.

• In case (alert) messages might get lost in the noise of other emails, a notification address can help out. A good and easy example of this is Pushover. Their do-not-disturb and quiet-hours settings are nice to have.

• Messages can be sent directly to Slack and Teams channels.

• An SMS gateway address can be used. However, SMS is insecure and severely limited regarding message length and is missing a subject, attachments, and line breaks in some cases. The dedicated email address your-organization@vision42.net may be used to authenticate the sender at the gateway of your choice.

• A non-address will exclude the user from any messages.

Combinations of the above can also be realized, by creating more than one account per person.

Forgotten passwords

Password management is done by clicking the reset-password link, next to the name of the user. If the identification of the user is a contact address, the new login credentials will be sent automatically. If not, the password will be displayed on screen, in order to convey it to the user by other means.

If desired, the user can change the reset password using her or his profile page.

Organization structure

This third section handles the organization structure. New departments can be created by providing:

• A name.

• The optional parent organizational entity.

 Add the new entity by clicking the plus icon.

Access roles

The user roles and corresponding rights are:

• Viewer: read access to assigned projects

• Contributor: write access to assigned projects

• Manager: user management (and read access to assigned projects)

• Auditor: read access to all projects

• Editor: write access to all projects

• Administrator: advanced settings, user management, and write access to all projects

Print / PDF

Invoking

Make use of the menu or the dedicated buttons within the Vision 42 app. The Ctrl + P or ⌘ P key combinations will also work as expected. Avoid using any print option in the browser's menus, since those will not resize maps correctly. The latter can also occur when printing from Android.

Note: Google Maps is here to blame.

Customized header

Vision 42 will add a nice header to prints and PDFs, containing customer information:

• Your logo.

• Your street address.

• Your website URL, email address, and phone number.

• A QR code, typically pointing to your contact page.

Please contact support, should this information have to be updated.

Typically, a browser will add its own header and footer, over which Vision 42 has no control. You can simply turn these off once, in the print dialog.

Quality

Care has been taken to achieve the best possible print / PDF quality. Plots, for example, will remain scalable vector graphics (SVG). Only maps are bit-mapped, due to the very nature of aerial and satellite photography.

Share

Use this menu option if you want to share a plot, a report, a review, a map, etc. with a user. The app state URL will be shared by chat, email, clipboard, or any other suitable app. In absence of sharing facilities, the URL will be copied to the clipboard.

About section

Statistics

This section contains interesting statistics about your data in the Vision 42 application. Note that the number of values will only be counted once a day, for performance reasons.

Changes

A history of all changes made to your instance of Vision 42 can be found here. In the QA-environment this list is supplemented by available changes not yet promoted to production.

Sign out

This menu option will delete your stored credentials and sign you out of the application.