GEMS 1.18 @district macro

The GEMS 1.18 district dialog has a new field, "Tag". Tags are an alphanumeric "short label" used to identify a district. I'll talk more about the motivation for the new tag field under a different cover, but for now its enough to know they are a new alphanumeric way of identifying a district. Examples of district tags might be:

GEMS 1.18 also has a new header artwork macro somewhat similar to @precinct. It is @district@, and it comes in three flavors:

@district:<parent tag>@

@district-tag:<parent tag>@

@district-exp:<parent tag>@

The @district:<parent tag>@ macro is replaced by the label for the subdistrict in which the card's base precinct resides for that parent tag. (yep that is a mouthful). For example is easier. Say you have @district:SEN@. When printing artwork, this will expand to the district label of the senate subdistrict. Card 3 might expand to "Senate 11". The @district-tag and @district-exp macros expand to the subdistrict tag and subdistrict export id respectively.

This feature is really quite powerful. It should be able to replace much of the "variable data" postprocessing done by the good people at Spectrum. Just set up a district for whatever data you want identified on the ballot artwork, and then build relationships to the base precincts.

I was too lazy to do a @district-id:<parent tag>@ variant to expand to the district's numeric id. You can work around it by entering a tag that is the same as the id, but that's lame. Twist my arm and I'll look into it, but really I don't think anyone assigns district ids that mean anything in the real world anyway (hint, this fact is the motivation for tags).

Like the @precinct macro, @district won't work in general when using sequence numbers. No real loss here, since you are going to get more plates anyway if you want the districts printed on the ballot.

The tag field has also been added to the report precinct and base precinct dialogs, but there isn't currently a way to access the tag (or export) fields with the @precinct macro. The intent is to create a special tag for report precinct and base precinct, maybe @district:RP-PCT@ and @district:BS-PCT@, or something. This isn't implemented yet though. Inside GEMS precincts are implemented as districts, and I am still looking for a clean way of presenting this fact to users that doesn't make their heads explode. In the mean time, to get the same effect you can set up a district for every precinct (like when you have precinct committee people races) and then use the @district macro on the "Precinct" parent district.

Finally on the Spectrum variable data front, it is currently pretty hard (though not impossible) to fit the @district concept into the vote center and counter group paradigms. We'll still need their help for that. This is a big step in the right direction to doing this in the future however.