Activities: keeping your networks apart

Many organizations maintain more than one network. The same woods hold bike trails in summer and cross-country ski tracks in winter, sometimes on different routes, with different crews and different seasons.

The activity is the wall between all of that. It is Sentinel's highest-level partition: a trail belongs to one activity, and tasks, structures, conditions, task types and structure types follow from there.

Without that wall, your summer map would show ski tracks and your statistics would blend the two.

Where: left navigation bar, under Administration → Activities.

Choosing your place's activities

The Activities section lists the ten activities Sentinel knows about. You switch on the ones that concern you.

Nothing applies until you hit Save, and at least one activity must stay on — a place with none would have no possible trails or tasks.

Turning a new one on is safe. Sentinel automatically creates its default task type and structure type: you can start creating tasks in it right away, without going through the configuration sections first.

Turning one off deletes nothing. That activity's trails, tasks and history stay in the database. The activity simply stops being offered: it disappears from the picker and the lists. Switching it back on brings everything back.

One useful side effect: turning an activity off also removes it from your members' activity restrictions. Someone who only had ski access doesn't end up stranded with nothing.

Switching between activities

Day to day, you only work in one activity at a time. The picker at the top right says which one.

Three things to know:

The choice is remembered per place. If you manage two places, each keeps its own preferred activity. You come back to the right one, and it survives closing the browser.

The picker is inert if you only have access to one activity — no arrow, no menu. That's not a fault.

What you see depends on two things, and this is the most common source of confusion: the place's activities (what your organization maintains) and the member's activities (the subset they were allowed, set on their member page). With no restriction, the member sees all of the place's.

In other words: if a colleague can't see cross-country skiing although you turned it on, check their activity restriction before doubting the place's configuration.

Switching activity on mobile

In the field, the picker is not at the top of the screen. It is a round green button at the bottom left of the map, in the row of floating buttons.

It only appears if you have access to at least two activities. That's the most common reason people can't find it: on a single-activity place, or for a member restricted to one, the button simply doesn't exist.

Tapping it opens the list.

The choice is remembered the same way as on the web: you come back to the right activity next time you open the app.

Where activities show up next

Once your activities are chosen, they come back in four places:

Who can change the list

Changing a place's activities falls under the place's administration rights — it is a structural setting, on a par with the place's information.

If you can see the section and its switches but saving is refused, that is the right you're missing, not the trails one.

One piece of advice

Only turn on what you actually maintain. Every active activity adds an entry to the picker, a column to the configuration screens and one more choice at every trail import. A "just in case" activity costs the whole team friction, every day. You can always switch it on the day the network exists.