The bulk update feature under Settings| Control panel | Maps is great but lacks a few features to make it work really well. Quite often we use this to updates hundreds or thousands of records and it doesn’t cope with this very well. Here are some ideas to make this easier:
- It would be nice if the Update feature could handle large data sets better. Maybe it could show a progress bar. Also, it currently times out if you run it against a large data set. Maybe at the very least send info back on the processed items instead of waiting for the entire page to load (and time out)
- Groups are unsorted (it seems they are in database order) which makes it really hard to find the ones you need:
Compare that with the user groups in the backend:
It would be nice if the list box would reflect the user groups hierarchy with some indenting and with groups sorted alphabetically within their parent. If indenting is not an option, sorting all group alphabetically in the list would already be a step forwards.
For a large dataset, my current work flow is as follows:
- Create custom bit field “Needs geo update”
- In the database populate this field and set it to true/false depending on presence of Geo data (you can't filter on that field in a Smart Search)
- Build smart search from this custom field (= true)
- Build user group from this smart search
- Run backend update against the newly created group
- When a time out is encountered, repeat step 2 through 5.
- Repeat until all is done.
There’s got to be a better way than this :-)