General settings

The general settings options are as follows:

• Cost Unit—The standard of measure for displaying the length and area of features to be costed.
• Cost Symbol—Displays the cost.
• Round Cost—The rounded final cost of the project.

  Note:

  Individual line items are not rounded, only the final result.

• Type of Project Area—As you sketch in features, a boundary of all the features in your project is made. Use this setting to determine the type of area you want.
• Allow users to export report of the project—Users can export a report of all the assets and any additional costs associated with the project. To make changes to the report format, click the edit button. In the Report Setting window, specify the report name, what information to include, and in what order.

Project settings

The project settings options are as follows:

• Define geography for costing—This option allows you to set cost equations of feature templates based on geographies.
  • Costing Geometry Layer—If your project consists of different areas of interest, and those areas have different costs associated with them, specify them here. This layer must be a polygon.
  • Field to Label Geography—The descriptive field of the costing geometry to display.
• Ability to Save and Load project settings—Configuring these tables and layers allows you to save or load the project.

  Note:

  The settings on these tabs are optional. If you decide not to specify any of these parameters, you can still cost out features you sketch on the map. The widget still provides the final cost of all features sketched. It will not save the project, so if you restart the app, all your cost information is removed.

  • Project Assets Table—This table associates all drawn features to the project along with any costing geography so that a project can be reloaded at any time.
  • Project Multiplier Additional Cost Table—This table stores costs that are not associated with any feature, such as rebates, credits, sponsorships, and rentals.
  • Project Layer—This is a polygon feature layer that stores the details of the project along with the net and gross cost of the project.
  • Point Layer Centroid—This point feature layer is automatically generated based on the centroid of the project layer.

Layer settings

The Layer settings tab shows all the layers in the map. You can select the layers you want to edit and use for costing out a project. If there are layers that are not editable, the Editable check box will be unavailable. Optionally, you can configure the attribute settings to map project fields to corresponding layer fields.

Costing information

The options on the Costing Info tab are as follows:

• Feature Template—The layers for which you enabled editing on the Layer settings tab are listed here as individual tables. There is a row for each feature template for its corresponding layer. This allows you to cost each feature template independently. You can have more than one of the same feature template as long as you have a different Geography or Scenario setting for each.
• Cost Equation—This is where you define the cost for each feature template.

  You can have a fixed number, such as 100. Each time you sketch in a feature from this feature's template, 100 appears in the line item. This text field also supports mathematical expressions. Additionally, there are built-in variables you can access to build complex expressions. These built-in variables are {MEASURE} for the length or area of the feature, {TOTALMEASURE} for the length or area of all the same drawn features, and {TOTALCOUNT} for the count of all the same features. You can build an expression such as {MEASURE} * 100. If you draw a line, the widget will multiply the length of the line by 100 to calculate the cost of that feature.

• Geography—If you specified a cost geography on the Project Settings tab, this drop-down list will show the distinct records.

  The Geography option allows you to define cost by geographic area. For example, you have a costing geography that consists of high fire threat regions and low fire threat regions, and you have a feature layer for electric poles. Your feature templates for an electric pole are based on material, and one of the values is wood. For the low fire threat region, you set the cost to x, where x is the base cost of the pole. In the high fire threat region, you set the value of the wood pole to 2x, because it has to be treated to resist fire. If you choose to break down your costing by geography, you need to ensure that for each feature template, you have a none case. This is in case your sketch falls into an area that is outside of any costing geography, but still needs a cost associated with it.

• Scenario—Scenarios behave similarly to geography but without any spatial component. If you have different use cases where you need to have different costs, this is when scenarios are useful. You can manage scenarios by clicking the Manage Scenarios button.

  For example, if you have a tree trimming route, you can define different contractors as scenarios so that contractor 1 costs x amount to trim trees and contractor 2 costs y amount to trim trees. The contractors would be added as scenarios. You can have the same scenario in different costing geographies. In this example, contractor 1 can trim in both high and low fire threat regions.

• Actions—Allows you to delete or copy rows.

Additional settings

If there is a need to understand statistical information in your project, use the Additional settings tab to configure those calculations.

• Statistics—Allows you to define statistics that persist to all new projects. You can also build new statistics while using the widget; these statistics are not saved and are lost when the application is reloaded.
• Additional Project Cost—Allows you to define additional project costs that persist to all new projects.