Managing Complex Hierarchies

By default, GeoPard supports only two levels of hierarchy (farm and field), but that is not enough in a case when you manage several farms with dozens of fields or consult numerous clients with several fields.

For that purpose, GeoPard has a flexible mechanism of field labels. You can create as many labels as you want and assign a different name for each label and add as many values to it as it is required. A label is a key-value pair, where the key is a hierarchical entity (f.e. “Client”, “Region”, “Crop2021”, etc.) and the value is an element of the list with all potential options for the key (f.e. “Client” as a key can have “John Smith”, “Betty Johnson” as values).

Labels are created on the account level and are not shared. Using the created labels and values you can search and filter fields by labels and their values. This will allow you to limit the list of displayed fields to those, which require your attention. If you work in a group with your colleagues, then you need to agree with your colleagues on naming and values you will use to have a clean structure and to avoid mess.

Overview

  1. A label is a key-value pair, where the key is a hierarchical entity (ex: “Client”, “Grower”, “Crop2021”, “Region”) and the value is an element of the list with all potential options for the key (ex: “Client” as a key can have “Michael Jordan”, “Wayne Gretzky” as values).
  2. Every label can be linked to one or many fields directly.
  3. A field can contain multiple labels.
  4. Labels are linked to the account.
  5. You can search and filter fields using labels.

Case: Managing fields for several clients

In case you use GeoPard to manage farms or fields for several clients, you can create labels to distinguish fields by name-values as shown in the table below per each client:

You can configure the mentioned hierarchy in two ways:

  1. Manual way: create all labels (key-value pairs) manually using the interface and assign them using bulk operation. Click Edit Fields button and select the fields, for which you want to assign a label, and then click Add Labels button to assign the selected labels and then click Finish Editing button to quit edit mode.
  2. Automatically: upload the field boundaries with .shp and .dbf together, .dbf contains the attributes with the hierarchy details.

Click Upload in the left menu, select the farm where the boundaries will be uploaded, select the .dbf file and click Upload button.

Wait for the confirmation dialog to see that the boundaries were uploaded successfully:

If the .dbf file contained the labels, you will see them on the Fields view:

To filter the field list, you can use the created labels – click the filter and select ‘Client Name’ -> ‘John Smith’ – to display only the fields for your client John Smith:

Keep in mind that you can apply multiple filter criteria based on the labels you created:

Case: Season details including crop and year

You can also use labels for fast access to the fields with the defined crop/variety or with the defined year.

  1. Collect the list of used crops: corn, wheat, canola, etc.
  2. Create labels manually or automatically (described above, ex. label key: “Crop”, label values: “Wheat”, “Corn”, “Soybean”).
  3. Assign labels using bulk operation:

    Click Edit Fields button and select the fields, for which you want to assign a label, and then click Add Labels button:

You can use the same approach for adding year information:

Then you can apply both labels to search for fields based on crop name and year labels:

Case: Field operation details

You can also use labels for fast access to fields to check planned/executed operations.

  1. Define the list of operations.
  2. Create labels manually or automatically via upload (ex. label key: “Field Operations”; label values: “TissueSampling”, “SoilSampling”, “Spraying”, “Seeding”, etc.).
  3. Add labels for status (ex. label key: “Status”; label values: “Planned”, “In Progress”, “Done”, etc.).

Then you can apply several labels to search for fields based on field operation and its status: