Managing bodies and contacts in FixMyStreet

A body is the authority to which problem reports will be sent. Each body needs one or more contacts (typically these are email addresses) to which particular categories of problem are sent.

For FixMyStreet in the UK, bodies are councils (county, district, and metropolitan).

How to add (or edit) a body

You need access to the administration pages of your FixMyStreet installation. By default, this is at /admin.

Click on Bodies and fill in the form. Normally, you must provide a name and pick at least one area it covers. See How FixMyStreet uses MapIt for more information on how these areas are chosen.

You can specify a send method. This is how FixMyStreet will send the problem reports to this body.

If you leave it blank, send method will default to email.

A body can have none, one, or many contacts. We strongly recommend every body has at least one.

Add contacts for every category of problem this body can handle

Even if you only have one email address for the body, you can add multiple contacts, because each contact is for a particular category of problem. So even if all the contacts’ email addresses are the same, FixMyStreet treats them separately. This often makes sense because the body passes these reports on to different departments internally. This is also the mechanism FixMyStreet uses to describe the category of the problem to the body: it’s included, clearly, in the email that is sent.

Here’s an example of a body and its contacts:

Body: South Borsetshire District Council

Contacts:

  Category              Email
  ---------------------------------------------------
  Bridges               road_department@sbdc.gov.uk
  Potholes              road_department@sbdc.gov.uk
  Traffic lights        road_department@sbdc.gov.uk
  Graffiti              services@sbdc.gov.uk
  Street lighting       lights@sbdc.gov.uk
  Other                 enquiries@sbdc.gov.uk

Problems about bridges, potholes, and traffic lights in South Borsetshire all get sent to the same email address. Don’t worry about the order in which the contacts appear in the admin, because FixMyStreet sorts them before presenting them to the user.

The FixMyStreet admin makes it easy to change your setup if the body changes its email addresses or even adds a new department after your site is running.

Normally, contacts use email addresses

In most new installations, each contact needs an email address because FixMyStreet will send the problem report to the body by email (that’s the default send method for bodies). Make sure you enter the correct email address! Note that the public users of FixMyStreet do not automatically see these email addresses, because FixMyStreet sends them directly to the body and not to the user.

If you’re only using email as the send method (which is by far the most common), you don’t need to provide any more data (such as endpoints or API keys). These fields are for alternatives to email.

Alternatives to email addresses

Although the default method for sending reports is email, there are other ways of sending the reports. Note, though, that alternatives to email are only possible if the body to which you are trying to send reports supports them. Some do; many do not.

See more about integration to understand the different ways this can work. The first stage of integration is injecting problem reports directly into the body’s back-end system.

We like Open311, which is an open standard for submitting problem reports to a body automatically (by sending the data directly to a webservice that consumes it). FixMyStreet also has a number of other, custom, methods for submitting data that we’ve written for specific councils in the UK: if you need to write your own, look at the code or ask us to help you. Custom integrations can sometimes be difficult, depending on how easy it is to get data in and out of the body’s internal, back-end systems.

You can change a body’s send method – for example, if you start by sending emails, but then discover the body is running an Open311 server, it’s easy to change over. Note that if you choose a different send method, FixMyStreet will need some extra information, such as the URL of the body’s endpoint. This appears on the form if it’s needed.

For more information about Open311, see this blog post explaining it.

Not all of a body’s contacts need to be sent the same way

In fact, if you’re working on an installation that can connect to bodies using a method other than email, not all of a body’s contacts need to be sent the same way. It’s possible to specify a different send method for an individual contact. To do this you need to tell FixMyStreet that, for this body, the decision of which send method to use can be devolved to the contacts. You’ll need to edit the body (in /admin) and check the box marked “Contacts can be devolved”. Then mark each of the contacts that are not using the body’s send method (which by default is email) as “devolved”, and specify their own send method and details.

Deleting contacts

If a contact is no longer valid, you can delete it or mark it as inactive. Find it on the body’s admin page, click to edit it, and select inactive or deleted.

Inactive contacts can still be filtered on map pages, but deleted contacts will not appear there at all. Neither sort of contact can be used for new reports.

Deleted contacts are not removed from the FixMyStreet database because doing so might break any existing problem reports that used it.

Deleting bodies

It’s unusual to need to delete a body, but it sometimes happens — for example, if a body ceases to exist because it has merged with an existing one. If this happens, remember that you may also need to create a new body, or change the admin boundary of an existing one.

To delete a body, go to the body’s admin page to edit it. Tick the checkbox marked Flag as deleted, and then click Update body.

This does not remove the body from the FixMyStreet database (because there may be existing problem reports that depend on it). The reports, and the “deleted” body, remain as historic data. Users cannot submit reports to a deleted body.

In the UK, where FixMyStreet has been running for a long time, there have been several changes to the councils that we cover. You can see deleted councils marked in grey on the list of councils. We handle deleted councils as a special case because we want to direct the user to the appropriate extant body instead. For example, see the page for Alnwick Council’s reports; that council ceased to exist in 2009.

If you want to replicate behaviour like this on your site, copy the reports/_body_gone.html template from the fixmystreet.com cobrand into your own cobrand, customise it, and make sure you update the body to not be associated with any area. You can do this by editing the body, and at the Area covered drop-down menu making sure no areas are selected.