Question

What are Unit Groups in OpenGround Cloud Professional?

Answer

A "Unit Group" has been added to each field in the model. Fields that contain no units will have the Unit Group field greyed out.

Unit Groups have been added for the purpose of Unit Conversion during data importing and data entry.

For the conversion to occur though, the units that you want to automatically convert on import need to be part of the same unit group. If they are not there will be an error reported in the import wizard.

A simple example of Unit Conversion is for Meters and Feet which are in the same unit group, the data being imported has the unit set to Feet but the field in the project is set to meters.

On import the process will see this and convert the feet data to meter data.

What are Unit Groups and How do they work?

Each unit group can be editable by selecting the Manage Unit Groups button in the ribbon either in a project, or within a configuration pack.

Each unit group has a primary unit that is then used to do conversions to other units. In the length example above, Meters are the standard unit for the unit group, with a conversion factor of 1 and an offset factor of 0. For feet, the conversion factor instead is 0.3048. This means that when a foot is used on import or data entry (if the column is set to meters), it will be 0.3048 meters that is actually stored. 

Note that the primary unit doesnt have to be the one that is sued for columns that use that unit group - it is just the one that the calculations are based from.

It is possible to add new groups, although we would recommend using the default groups wherever possible as these have standard values present that can be used.

When editing a unit group, to add new units, the following information will need to be provided.

Value - This is the name of the unit. If adding a new unit, add it to the units picklist first by selecting the Create Unit button at the bottom of the window.

Description - This is the description of the unit from the units picklist.

Conversion Factor - This is the value that will be used to work out what the value should be when a different unit is used. 

Offset Factor - This is the base number for converting numbers from one to an another. For most units this will be 0, however for unit groups such as temperature, this can vary as the 0 point for both units is different.

Primary - This selects whether the currently selected unit is the primary unit for the group. If this is selected, it is recommended that this is the unit that has the Conversion Factor of 1 and Offset Factor of 0.

Conversion - (shown off screen in the below screenshot) This shows an example of what 1 primary unit will be converted to with this new unit. For example, 1 degC would be 1.799999 degF using the information below.