SSP SPANS 4.0.7 – What’s New?

February 10, 2020 — Keith Hupperts

As mentioned in the December 2019 press release, SSP SPANS 4.0.7 is now available.  SPANS (Spatially-enabled Permitting and Notification System) is an industry-leading cloud-based application that enables efficient communication, rigorous management, and timely and accurate reporting essential to the effective execution of utility/telecom joint use activities.

Stated, almost in passing, were two simple words ‘Code upgrade’.  That doesn’t seem like much but it’s crucially important to SPANS as a product.

The migration of the core SPANS code base allows for both enhanced performance while ensuring technology compliance with current web-based software technologies.  Key to this effort was the incorporation of AngularJS and VueJS, two open-source frameworks used extensively in the developer community to create better dynamic web pages.

spansrelease_fig1
spansrelease_fig2

These two technologies allow the developers to organize code into modular components that are more discrete and reusable, easier to test, and simpler to extend.  Additionally, with these tools we have added RESTful APIs (Application Programming Interface) to SPANS.  APIs will allow SPANS to communicate to applications, both within the SSP Solution and 3rd party applications, through standard web-based requests and responses.

The addition of AngularJS and VueJS were key technology components of another SPANS enhancement in December – adding Single Pole Edit mode to the application.  Using the RESTful Pole APIs, it is now possible to edit poles individually without having to make a round-trip to the server to update the entire Pole page.  The tool allows the user to move through the set of poles associated with a proposal, calling each poles specific URL through the pole API as it is loaded into the user interface.  This improves the overall user experience by applying all of the rules within SPANS to the edits in one round-trip to the web server rather than for each edit.

This effort has already borne more fruit in the SPANS January 2020 minor release.  This release has added new capabilities and modernized existing SPANS functionality to address long-standing user requests while taking advantage of the new APIs and capabilities.

First, a small but extremely useful new function is the ability to drag/drop pole ordering the Pole Grid control within the Poles page with arrows indicating where in the grid the pole will be placed.

Second, is a change to existing functionality – allowing for drag/drop of document uploads in addition to the existing file explorer approach within the SPANS Attachment tool.

Click here for more details on these additional enhancements.

The SPANS team is excited to continue to grow and improve the capabilities of SPANS leveraging these new technologies as the year progresses.

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Keith Hupperts

Joint Use Sr. Manager / Product Strategy & Management

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