A common thing that land conservation organizations want to know is what properties need to be monitored yet this year. It's easy in Landscape to generate this list using a View, but you need to understand how Obligations work first.
First, anything related to things you do on a piece of property are stored in a Stewardship Site record. Second, Landscape doesn't know what you need to do on a Stewardship Site unless you tell it. You tell it what you need to do by adding Obligations. The Obligations list is on the Details tab in a Stewardship Site.
Obligations can be anything you want because they have Names and Types that you can define. You may just need an Annual Monitoring obligation. Or, you may have several types of obligations on a Stewardship Site because of various funding you received or terms in a conservation easement.
The important thing to know about an obligation is how its dates work. An obligation has three dates - Start By, Complete By, and Completed On. If you don't have a specific part of a year when the obligation needs to be completed, you can leave the Start By and Complete By dates alone. But, if you want to specify that the Obligation be completed in the Spring, you could set the Start By and Complete By dates to something else.
The Complete By date is important because it determines when the dates are reset to the next period. In the example above, on January 1st, 2021, the Start By date will reset to January 1st, 2021 and the Complete By date will reset to December 31st, 2021. If the Completed On date was filled in, it will be cleared out.
Click on an obligation to see more details about it.
To assist you with obligation creation, there is a narrative description of the obligation printed within the 'edit obligation' screen. This text will update based on the dates you enter in the 'Start By'/'Complete By'/'Repeat Every' fields:
Obligations and Views
So, if you want to create a View that shows all the Stewardship Sites that need to be monitored, what you are really going to ask Landscape to show you is all of the Stewardship Sites that have Obligations of a certain Type that don't have a Completed On date.
To do that, go to Views from the Home page, and create a new View by clicking on the plus button next to the drop-down list of all your Views.
The first step is to select Stewardship Sites as the category of data you are looking for. Then, you need to search for those Stewardship Sites will Obligations that meet our criteria. To do that, you need to drill down into the Obligation fields.
Once you click on the Obligations group, the fields in that group will expand. Choose the Completed Date field.
We want the Completed Date to be Empty.
If we just press the checkbox in the upper left corner of the View editor to see our results, we will get a list of Stewardship Sites that match our criteria. That may be good enough, but all we know is that these Stewardship Sites have at least one Obligation that is incomplete, but we don't know what type or anything else about the Obligations themselves. Since we really want to see the Obligations, let's Expand our View to show one row for each Obligation that matches our criteria.
Go back into the View editor and click the gear icon to right of where it says Stewardship Sites, then choose Expand and Filter Results. You will now be able to choose a field to Expand. Select Obligations.
Then, you can add criteria to specify which Obligations you want to see. Select the Type field, then select Annual Monitoring (or whatever your equivalent Type is).
When we click the check button to close the editor, we'll now see a result for each Obligation that meets our criteria. The benefit of Expanding our View is that we can drill down into the data we want to see AND the fields in the expanded field are now available to you in the Columns chooser.
Click the 3-dots button to open the menu for the View and select Choose Fields. Scroll the list on the left down to the Obligations group. You can now select Obligation fields to show in the View. Select things like Name, Type, and Last Completed Date.
Click OK, and now our results list will look something like this:
Click the Save View button (the cloud with up-arrow) to the right side of the View selector (which will say Ad Hoc View) to save your view and give it a name. Now you can select this View at any time to see what Obligations have yet to be completed.
When you've completed an Obligation in a Stewardship Site, make sure to edit the Obligation and give it a Completed date. That's the only way the View you just created will be useful.
If you need to add an obligation to multiple Stewardship Sites at once, you can do so using views. Here's a short article that walks you through that process.
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