Capture of Business hours

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11-18-2021 08:39 PM
TobyStewart2
New Contributor II

I have created a Survey in connect and was asked to include business hours. 

Other than creating a free text field for each day and getting the respondent to type the hours in, I considered creating  2 fields for each day ie: Monday Open & Monday close with a select one option of the hours of the day, which includes a "closed" option.

Not sure if either is easy to work in as the data needs to feed to a public based web map

Any suggestions on capturing business hours in a Survey??

1 Reply
GIS_Fox
Occasional Contributor III

Hi @TobyStewart2 , sounds pretty straightforward if you go with two fields, but of course there are always other options. What may make it easier on the two fields would be to use two time fields for open close time like you said, but group it by day. For example, a group of questions for Monday would have a Time field for open, Time field for close, and maybe comments or lunch time field. Make 7 groups or use repeats for the seven days of the week then feed the data based on time fields into your public web app. Depending on how the data needs to be displayed or what kind of businesses you are surveying, it may be easier to do a weekly open/close time or a drop down selection. Eg, the nearly standard 9-5 option or graveyard shift options would be easy dropdowns, having some comment or other option fields for lunch time or holiday schedules to accommodate how the calendar goes. A combination would work too, if you have numerous kinds of businesses so long as the public facing data can be cleaned and oriented towards giving even and accurate information, it can be done. Time of incident is the most common field type of question I have for S123, such as start of incident and end of incident. I like the idea of capturing business hours, especially with say small businesses with odd hours but with a need for public promotion. I think the information intake is easy to play with and to find what works, but the key part since your plan is to show this on a public app then would be formatting the data so it can be shown in several ways or symbologies. That way it can be utilized in more ways than one to allow for oddities or edits later on. If you then pull that info into dashboards, for example, you can show all kinds of indicators and date selection categories to best show the info on a live or near live basis. Having simple data formatting will help set you up for which ever you need or want.

Hope this helps, time functions are a fun topic and I enjoy the idea of capturing business hours with S123. Eager to hear how your project goes and what you find works for you.

God bless, 

 

Jansen Lyons - Records and GIS Section - Public Works - City of Rio Rancho, NM