The location of the mobile devices carried by field crews/employees can be recorded for use within Infor EAM. This is accomplished by periodically recording the device location by creating a record in table R5MOBILELBSDATA. These location records are sometimes called ‘breadcrumbs’ within EAM because they allow for a nice visual representation of the routes traveled by crews/employees during their workday.
This screen does NOT use breadcrumb location records to display the location of the crew/employee. Instead, the device’s location is displayed on this screen using the operating system GPS location services. See Location services for details.
However, if the Supervisor Dispatch Overview screen is being used by supervisors to monitor the progress of their field crews/employees dispatched to various WO activities, mobile breadcrumbs must be enabled on the server so that screen can show the most recently recorded location of each crew/employee relative to their WO activity locations.
There are two methods of creating breadcrumbs:
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Time-based location tracking:
This approach can be used when it is important to capture a location periodically, even if the device itself is not moving. Two install parameters in base EAM will control enabling this type of location tracking, along with the ‘time interval’ for which location breadcrumb records are created on the EAM server. The mobile application (Digital Work and Mobile Transit) will create breadcrumbs when time-based location tracking is enabled, only when the application is in the foreground.
GPSLSRCD – This install parameter must be set to ON, for time-based location tracking to be enabled.
GPSLSINT – If GPSLSRCD is set to ON, then GPSLSINT will be used to determine the ‘interval’ in which the device’s current location is sent to the server.
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Distance-based location tracking --- RECOMMENDED WHEN THE SUPERVISOR DISPATCH OVERVIEW SCREEN IS BEING USED:
This approach can be used when it is important to capture a location only if the device is moving. In addition, the device location is captured when logging into the application. It allows breadcrumbs to be created even when the application is not in the foreground, as is the case when crews/employees are traveling to job sites with their device is locked and stored. If they are signed into Digital Work and moving, breadcrumbs will be created.
The following install parameter allows the customer to enable distance-based location tracking and to set a maximum frequency at which location updates will be sent to the server. The maximum frequency should be entered in minutes.
GPSLSDMF (GPS location services distance max. frequency) - Valid values are 0 and positive integers.
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If the value is <> a positive integer >= 5, then do NOT perform distance-based location recording (i.e., distance-based tracking is disabled).
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If the value = a positive integer >= 5 (i.e., distance-based tracking is enabled), the device will perform distance-based location recording locally, every 500 meters of device movement. However, the device will NOT send more than 1 location update to the server during each interval, in minutes, specified in this parameter.
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GPSLSDMF applies to the Digital Work app only. The Mobile Transit app will NOT use the GPSLSDMF parameter (i.e., it will only perform time-based location tracking).
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Distance-based location tracking records will only be created if the user’s Digital Work session is active. The app does NOT need to be in the foreground (see app level permission required for limitations).
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The user must set the share location with Digital Work to “always” for distance-based location tracking to create breadcrumbs even when the app is NOT in the foreground. If permissions are set to “while using the app”, breadcrumbs will only be created while the app is in the foreground.
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If distance-based and time-based location recording are both enabled, Digital Work will only use distance-based location recording.
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For distance-based and time-based location recording, if the user does NOT select to allow the location access during login when prompted, the location will not be tracked in the database.
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Valid values for this parameter are: 0 and positive integers >=5. The default value is 10 (minutes). This value can be set as low as 5. Breadcrumb records cannot be created any more frequently than every 5 minutes while the device is moving to reduce the possibility of performance problems when customers have large numbers of field crews/employees and breadcrumbs enabled.