Street aliases are a powerful tool in Crash Magic. This section gives an overall view of aliases that will help you determine when it is a good time to use a street alias. See also Step by Step Aliases.
A street alias allows two streets to be referenced as one street. In other words, a street alias will link two streets together so that requesting one street will gather the collisions from the other.
Street alias are an "always is" relationship. For example, "Badway" always is "Broadway". It is important that you only use street aliases when the one location always is the other location. If you have a street (like a state highway) that might have a break or jump from one street to another, a street alias has the possibility of combining the two intersections. In this case you may not want to alias the names.
Another consideration is if a street has a prefix or suffix. Like "North Broadway" or "South Broadway". You'll have to decide how to alias those names based upon a misspelling or in some cases it may be better to change/fix the street name in a crash record in Crash Magic's data entry program instead of creating an alias. That would ensure the location is correct. Or in some cases you could set up the aliases to not look at the prefix or suffix and just alias all the possibilities to "Broadway". Please contact us if there's a question about this.
Street aliases can be more than one level deep. Allowing for you to alias Badway to Broadway, and then alias Broadway to Broadway Blvd.
Administrative users notes:
oStreet aliases can only be created by Group Administrators.
oAlias group information is stored in an alias group resource (Hidden or Visible), but aliases are created and edited under the streets normalizer. The streets normalizers can be found in the group admin section of Crash Magic under the user group .config user.
oMost users will only have one street normalizer named "Default", but depending on the collision data multiple street normalizers could be found. Clients should review the study definitions to determine the specific normalizer to be used, or contact us if there's any question.
In this example the Alias groups Hidden and Visible are enabled in the Default street normalizer.
oAlias groups will need to have the "Enabled" checked in order for them to be used by the normalizer. This turns on alias groups to be used by the program.
oThe Visible check box determines whether the aliases should be displayed in the street selection list. In the previous example a misspelled street name like Badway is not an actual street and should not be in the list of selectable streets for a study query. Defining that misspelled street in the Hidden alias group, and Visible is unchecked will ensure that any streets selected as the "From" street in the alias group will not be displayed in the street selection list.
oA street that has two valid street names should be placed in an alias group that is Visible. For example if Hwy 85 is Broadway, and it is valid for a user to select either street name for a study query, then this alias entry should be placed in the Visible alias group. This will allow the user to see Hwy 85 and/or Broadway in a street selection box.
See also Step by Step Aliases or to add, delete or edit an existing street alias click on the alias group name Hidden or Visible, to be taken to the street alias editor. You can also click on the yellow "Dependent data" tab.