Incident Diagrams

The Incident module of CrimeStar allows you to imbed diagrams that have been created using another drawing or painting tool. Examples of these other programs include Microsoft Paint, Microsoft Visio or SmartDraw, AutoSketch, Easy Street-Draw and others. In fact ANY program capable of functioning as an OLE Server application will work with Crimestar RMS. Crimestar Corporation does not sell, license or represent these other programs in any way, we simply have programmed our product to interact with them using a standard technology known as Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).

The Configuration section of the Crimestar INI file contains an entry named DIAGRAMFILETYPE that can be set to different values, where the value represents the 3 character file extension typically used by your selected drawing tool. Example, if you wish to use SmartDraw as your drawing tool, then you would set this INI file entry to read DIAGRAMFILETYPE =SDR as all files created with SmartDraw typically have an "SDR" extension to them. Next, you need to create a blank template file using your selected drawing program. The file should be located in the Crimestar directory and should be named "INCDIAG". Again using the example of SmartDraw the template file we create using SmartDraw would be "INCDIAG.SDR".

Now when running Crimestar simply click on the diagram button located in the upper right corner of the incident module. This will cause CrimeStar to read the file extension from the DIAGRAMFILETYPE entry in the INI and ask windows to open the template file that contain that specific file extension. At that point whatever program is registered with windows to handle that specific file type will be activated. Now create your drawing or Diagram and select "Close" or "Close and Return" from the file menu of the drawing software. The terminology used on the menu differs from program to program, however you are looking for something other than the standard EXIT or QUIT. If the program is an OLE Server program, it will then pass your diagram back to Crimestar so that Crimestar can imbed it into the database for future reference.

Remember Crimestar knows NOTHING about your Diagram, except that it is supposed to store it with a particular incident report.......