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Dispatch Branch & Priority

Requires Advanced Alarm Handling

This card only appears on Settings → Dispatch when the control room has the Advanced Alarm Handling module on (super admins in Super-admin mode always see it) — the Dispatch entry is hidden otherwise. See Modules & Capabilities.

This card controls which units may respond where, and how they're ranked when you dispatch. It has two parts:

  • a branch hard cap — a unit can only be sent to a site in its own branch (think: keep one town's vehicles out of another town's jobs), and
  • a unit priority order — how the eligible units are sorted (by patrol suburb, by driving distance, or both).

Find it under Settings → Dispatch (the Dispatch branch & priority card). The settings are per control room (VCR) and write to the virtual_control_rooms row.

Off by default

The branch cap ships disabled. It also does nothing until you give units a home branch other than the auto Catch-all — see Branches and the bulk tool in Response → Units. So turning it on for the first time is safe: nothing changes until units are assigned to real branches.

Branch hard cap​

When Branch hard cap is on, a unit may only be dispatched to a site in the same branch. This is enforced everywhere a dispatch is created — the smart recommender in CleverCommand hides out-of-branch units, and the database refuses an out-of-branch dispatch even if one is attempted directly.

How a site's branch is decided:

  • Site → suburb. The site's position is matched against your drawn suburbs — either force-assigned to a suburb, or by falling inside the suburb boundary.
  • Suburb → branch. Every suburb belongs to a branch: its named branch if you've assigned one, otherwise the Catch-all. So a site in an unassigned suburb is capped to Default-Branch units, and named-branch units are held back from it.
  • Catch-all units = wildcard. A unit whose home branch is the Catch-all (or has no branch) can respond anywhere.
  • A site in no suburb is uncapped. If a site falls outside every drawn suburb it has no branch, so it's open to all units, ranked purely by distance. Missing map coverage never blocks a response.

Break-glass override​

With the cap on, Allow break-glass override lets an operator still dispatch an out-of-branch unit in a genuine emergency (nearest available unit, mutual aid). In CleverCommand the operator opens the unit picker, chooses Dispatch a unit outside the branch (override), picks the unit, and enters a short reason. The reason is logged against the event as an audit record, then the dispatch proceeds.

Turn Allow break-glass override off to make the cap absolute — out-of-branch dispatch is then impossible, with no override path.

Unit priority order​

This sets how the eligible (in-branch) units are ranked in the picker and by the recommender:

  • Suburb first, then distance — units whose patrol suburb covers the site rank first (by their suburb priority), and everyone else follows by driving ETA. Use this when you want the local patrol to take its own jobs before a closer-but-foreign unit.
  • Distance first, suburb bonus (default) — closest by driving ETA wins, with a small nudge in favour of the site's patrol unit. This is the original behaviour.
  • Distance only — pure nearest-first by driving ETA; patrol suburbs are ignored for ordering.

The order mode applies whether or not the branch cap is on.

Configure it​

  1. Go to Settings, then under Operations click Dispatch.
  2. Open the Dispatch branch & priority card.
  3. Toggle Branch hard cap on to restrict dispatch by branch. Leave Allow break-glass override on unless you want the cap to be absolute.
  4. Pick a Unit priority order.
  5. Click Save.

Rolling it out​

Because the cap keys off each unit's home branch, and every unit starts on the Catch-all, assign units to real branches before (or just after) enabling the cap:

  • One at a time: open a unit in Response → Units and set its Home branch.
  • In bulk: on the Response → Units tab, tick the units, choose a branch in the Assign branch bar, and click Assign.

Sites don't need manual branch assignment — they resolve to a branch automatically from the map suburb they fall in.

Where it's enforced​

  • CleverCommand smart picker — out-of-branch units are filtered from the recommendation, and the order mode drives the ranking.
  • Server-side guard — every dispatch (manual, recommended, or automatic) passes through a database check; an out-of-branch dispatch without a valid override is refused.

See also: Branches · Suburbs & map boundaries.