Customizing GIPS

GIPS is customized from GIPS Desktop, almost entirely through the Settings dialog opened by the gear icon above the map. Press F5 in GIPS Desktop to test a change. The few remaining files are in the configuration directory — Configuration Files... in GIPS Desktop opens it.

The Settings dialog

Controls are grouped into panes reached from a list on the left. A pane whose fields are invalid is marked in the list, and Save is refused until they are fixed.

Group	Pane	What it holds
Browser preferences	Map & display	Pan the map to the selected item, display the constraint label upon selection, format bus numbers with commas, display Dfax as a percentage.
Browser preferences	Thresholds & filters	Hide constraints with loading below a percentage, Ignore POI impact below a percentage, and the TrLim floor. Every threshold is off by default.
Browser preferences	Theme	Light, Dark, or System. See Theme.
Deployment configuration	Layers	For each of POI, Constraint and Harmer: the legend title, the color scale, and the table columns. See Ranges & Legend and Grids & Columns.
Deployment configuration	Data layers	Import and maintain your own data layers.
Deployment configuration	Branding & disclaimer	The company name shown in the footer, and the disclaimer GIPS Lite and Pro show at startup.
Deployment configuration	Map limits	The deepest zoom level available, 1–19.
Deployment configuration	Tour	The guided tour.
Administration	Map sources	Where this installation downloads its map styles from. Appears only when admin.json exists — see Administrator Options.

Browser preferences are saved in the browser's local storage, so each GIPS Lite and Pro user keeps their own. The deployment configuration and administration groups exist only in GIPS Desktop: deployment configuration is written to configuration.json and carried into every export, while administration settings are written to admin.json and never exported.

Theme

The Theme pane offers Light, Dark and System, the last following the operating system's own setting and reacting to a change in it while GIPS is running. Everything follows the choice: the controls, the tables, the header logo, and the map — which draws a light street style in Light and a muted, dark one in Dark.

GIPS Desktop writes the choice to the theme property of configuration.json, which is the theme GIPS Lite and Pro come up in each time they are opened. A configuration.json without the property comes up in System.

Methodology

An optional Methodology panel, opened by a tab on the right edge of the window, holds whatever you want to say about how the numbers were produced. GIPS Desktop edits it in place through a rich-text editor — bold, italic, headings, lists and links — and stores it in the methodology property of configuration.json. The HTML is sanitised before it is shown and links open in a new tab.

The tab appears in GIPS Lite and Pro only when there is content to read; in GIPS Desktop it is always there, so that there is somewhere to write it.

Disclaimer

The Disclaimer field in Branding & disclaimer controls the dialog GIPS Lite and Pro show at startup. Each line of the field becomes one paragraph, so a blank line becomes an empty paragraph. Clearing the field drops the disclaimer property from configuration.json altogether, and Lite and Pro start with no dialog.

GIPS Desktop does not show the disclaimer itself, so a Preview button beside the field opens the dialog exactly as those users will see it.

Legend titles

Each of the POI, Constraint and Harmer layers carries a legend title, set in the Layers pane. The constraint and harmer titles are the constraintLegendTitle and harmerLegendTitle properties of configuration.json; when either is absent, that section of the legend reads Constraints (kV) or Harmer Dfax (%). None of the titles may be left blank. GIPS Lite and Pro honour the values.

Map limits

Max zoom in the Map limits pane is the deepest zoom level available, 1–19 (default 19), written to the maxZoom property of configuration.json. GIPS Lite and Pro honour it, so readers cannot zoom past the detail your data supports; GIPS Desktop itself is not limited by it.

Other configuration properties

A few properties have no field of their own and are edited in configuration.json directly:

• dfaxAsPercent — true displays Dfax as a percentage rather than a decimal in the Constraints and Harmers tables; it is the property behind the Display Dfax as % control.
• contingencyBaseCaseAlias — replaces the words Base Case in the Constraints table's Contingency column with a name of your own.
• logoFile — see Branding files.

configuration-schema.json, beside configuration.json, lists every property with a description.

Branding files

A few things are still files rather than settings:

• Favicon — replace the favicon.png file in the root with your own.
• Page title — replace the text between the <title> and </title> tags in index.html.
• Header — composed of three elements, left to right: a logo, the words "Point of interconnection heatmap", and the help icon (a question mark).
• Company logo — replace the header-icon-logo.png file, or supply header-icon-logo-light.png and header-icon-logo-dark.png for a logo that does not read well against both themes. A logoFile named in configuration.json still wins, and GIPS falls back to header-icon-logo.png and then to its own logo, so a missing file shows a logo rather than a broken image.
• Help icon — replace the header-icon-help.png file.
• Footer — mostly hard-coded, except the company name: the Company name field in Branding & disclaimer, or the companyName property in configuration.json.

Administrator options

Settings meant for whoever installs GIPS — today, where the map styles are downloaded from — are kept apart from the above, in admin.json, and never exported. See Administrator Options.