Forum Discussion

ChrisNewsome's avatar
ChrisNewsome
Qrew Captain
5 years ago

Looking for Guidance on Vehicle management

So I am looking to build some vehicle management capabilities in Qbase, and I'm wondering what the best path would be for that. I am open to building another app, but if I can make it work in my current app, that would be my ideal solution.

What I'd like to do is have a record of the vehicle's info, and have associated records of any service, etc., for that vehicle. I'd also like to be able to automatically get a task to schedule service at certain intervals. In my initial thoughts, I'd have the drivers report their mileage at the end of the week, enter that into the vehicle record, and at pre-set intervals (like every 5000 miles), a task gets automatically created to our office manager to schedule service for the vehicle.

Currently i have a table in my main app for vehicles with all their info and service records recorded, what I can't seem to crack is getting the mileage and auto task to happen. Any suggestions out there? I'm open to scratching everything and starting over as we only have 20 vehicles.

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Chris Newsome
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2 Replies


  • I would approach this in a two-step process.
    The ultimate goal which will be the second step will be to  create a saved table to table import which will import vehicle records into the scheduled service tasks table for all vehicles that are now due to have a task created. Then that save table to table import can be run every night and any vehicle needing a task created will get it created.
    But what I would work on before that is to get that working on a report and have a single flag field on the vehicle record to filter the report. I have found in the past of buggy behavior in save table to table imports when you try to get too fancy with the filters. So I have often found that a  set of filter which should be perfectly valid doesn't work in the same table to table import and I've had to reduce it to a single checkbox field.

     OK, so now we got to figure out which vehicles need service. Arguably that is simple. Create a formula field on the vehicle record which will calculate to the rounded 5000 km below the vehicles current mileage. So for example if the mileage was 25,500,  The calculation would result in 25,000. 

     Then there would be a trial table of scheduled tasks and it would record that the service now due is the 25,000 checkup.  Now you can compare the highest scheduled checkup with the 25,000 calculated in the vehicle and see that the service test had already been created.

    but then the vehicle hits 30,100 so the flag field would now be true because 30,000 is greater than the scheduled 25,000 mile service task.

    so that night the Automation would run the saved table to table import and one record would be created.








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    Mark Shnier (YQC)
    Quick Base Solution Provider
    Your Quick Base Coach
    http://QuickBaseCoach.com
    markshnier2@gmail.com
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    • ChrisNewsome's avatar
      ChrisNewsome
      Qrew Captain
      Mark,

      That was a lot to digest. Would you care to tell me what tables I need to have? I can't seem to parse that out of what you wrote. It's probably because I don't fully understand the process you're talking about creating.

      Thanks!

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      Chris Newsome
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