Units
Within the Helix ecosystem, a Unit is an individual person within an organisation who can form part of a resource.
Resources vs Units
A Resource is a deployable entity within Helix. Resources are transient, meaning that they exist for a specific purpose or time period (e.g. a shift or event) and are not permanently available.
Only resources can be deployed to incidents. Units who are without any additional entities (e.g. a sole officer on foot patrol) create a 'Shadow Resource' which can be deployed to incidents.
Resources can contain a combination of units and assets. Units are the individuals who are responsible for the resource, while the assets are non-human entities that are part of the resource.
Think of a resource as a container/group for units and assets. Anything which will be travelling as one entity should be defined as a resource.
Example: Police Patrol Car
Alice and Bob are both police officers. Their role is to respond to inbound incidents in the West End of the city. They have been allocated car A01 for their shift, and their call sign is DD50.
In this example, Alice and Bob are both defined within the Helix system as units rather than resources. The resource (A01) is a combination of the two units and the police car asset. Note that the resource is referred to by its call sign. The police car they are using is an asset within the system which has also been linked to the resource. In our example, the resource would be defined as DD50 with Alice and Bob as units and A01 as an asset.
There is no requirement to name the resource differently from the call sign. For example, many organisations choose to use the vehicle identifier as the resource name.
Creating a Unit
A unit represents a person within your organisation, and is used within the resource creation process to assign ownership and responsibility for resources.
Helix Dispatcher (Desktop or Web)
It is not recommended to create units via the Helix application as it can cause data inconsistencies. Instead, units should be created via the Helix API. Nevertheless, the facility to create units via the Helix application is available to administrators with the Manage Users permission.
Access Resources > Unit Management and select Create Unit in the top right corner to create a new unit.
Helix API
The Helix API provides a POST endpoint to create a new unit. Consult the Units API documentation for more information.
External System ID
When creating a unit, you will be asked to provide an External System ID. This field is optional, but can be used to store an identified from an external system to link the unit to a record in another system.
Active Directory
This feature is only available to organisations using the Enterprise version of Helix.
If your organisation uses Active Directory, to enable automatic sign-in for your users, the External System ID must be the sign-in name as defined in Active Directory. This will allow Helix to automatically sign in users who are authenticated with Active Directory.
FiveM
The FiveM Integration developed by Helix will populate the External System ID field dependent on the integration configuration (defined on individual end servers). Consult the FiveM Integration documentation for more information.
Other Systems
For other systems, e.g. HR Record Management, the External System ID can be used to store a unique identifier for the unit in that system. This can be used to link records between Helix and the external system.
Where Helix maintains a first-party integration with an external system, the External System ID field will be populated with the relevant system identifier automatically.