BETTER analysis: Errors due to wrong mapping - can we improve this?

[RDmitchell]

Instance: dev1 SHA: 5f7d20c31 Org: LBL Test 401

In order to perform a BETTER analysis, fields must be mapped properly.

For example, BETTER wants the following fields:

• Property Type
• State
• City

The default fields in ESPM are

• Property Type - Self Selected or some other variant on Property Type
• State/Province
• City/Municipality

If the user doesn't know to change these fields, then the BETTER analysis will not run.

It gives these errors

• Error preparing BETTER input: BETTER analysis requires the property's type must be one of the following: Office, Hotel, K-12 School, Hospital (General Medical & Surgical), Bank Branch, Courthouse, Data Center, Distribution Center, Financial Office, Multifamily Housing, Non-Refrigerated Warehouse, Refrigerated Warehouse, Retail Store, Senior Care Community, Supermarket/Grocery Store, Other
  • This error isn't very illuminating, because the Property Types are actually all Office, but the Property Type field is mapped as Property Type - Self Selected.
• Error preparing BETTER input: BETTER analysis requires the property's state.
• Error preparing BETTER input: BETTER analysis requires the property's city.

The problem is that the user has to then reimport their data with different field mappings in order to get BETTER to run.

I am wondering if there is something we can do, possibly at the time of Mapping, to help the user understand how to map their fields if they want to do a BETTER analysis?

It seems like the first thing to do would be to add some help text in the "Step 1: Map Your Data" section

In general, we need to give users more information about how to properly map their data, so I guess we should start here.

Maybe there are some more "aggressive" ways to handle this, but for now, I think we should at least add more documentation.

[RDmitchell]

And because the ESPM fields come in as extra data if they are not "remapped", I don't think changing their display name will help

[RDmitchell]

I verified that changing the display names didn't fix the problem, because these are extra data fields with those names

and same with State

[RDmitchell]

Here is some possible text to add to the Step1 mapping tab

BETTER Analysis Mapping A BETTER analysis requires that both "City" and "State" fields be defined properly in the mapped fields. BETTER also requires that "Property Type" be defined as a field.

For example, in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, those fields may be defined as

• Property Type - Self Selected
• City/Municipality
• State/Province

In that case, you should remap them to:

• Property Type
• City
• State

[RDmitchell]

After reimporting my data 3 times, with the proper mapping, it does appear that I am getting some BETTER results.

So we definitely need to figure out how to improve the user experience.

And reimporting the way I did wouldn't really be practical if already had a lot of imported data. In my case I had a clean slate, but that is not generally the case. Users could have a ton of data already imported with the wrong mapping that they couldn't really reimport very easily.

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This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity within 60 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity within 60 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity within 60 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity within 60 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.