Level 1 Action Plan selection
This document is intended for advanced Patriot users and contains a full description of Patriot's Action Plan selection procedure. Be aware that this document includes references to legacy features such as Site Action Plan and Action Plan Cascade that are no longer considered best practice.
When a signal is logged in Patriot the system retrieves an Action Plan for this signal to decide how to handle it. When choosing an action plan Patriot uses an order of precedence which places Zone/User assigned action plans before event type assigned action plans. If none of these sources yields an action plan, then the global default action plan is used as the last resort*. If a Null Action Plan is found at any level, this tells the system to skip this level and try further down.
*If you have the Legacy Site Action plan enabled in system wide response settings then the Site Action Plan will be used before the global default.
As an aid to the understanding of action plan selection in Patriot, let us introduce the concept of the Level 1 Action Plan. In most situations this simply refers to the action plan assigned to the signal event type. This assignment is typically made via a client's Event Type template (template chaining is supported) but can be made directly on the client if overriding the template type action plan is desired.
Choosing Level 1 Action Plan
If the level 1 AP has a signal type of opening, closing, or user info, it involves the User, so we check to see if the User has an Action Plan assigned. If it does, we use this Action Plan, otherwise we use the level 1 action plan.
If the level 1 Action Plan has a signal type of Restoral, or Zone Info, it involves the zone, so we check to see if the Zone has an Action Plan. If it does, we use this Action Plan, otherwise we use the level 1 Action Plan.
At zone level, you have two options for changing the signal behaviour (changing the action plan). Either option will take precedence over event type assignments. You can override all Action Plans with a single Action Plan, or you can override individual Action Plans. In most cases overriding individual Action Plans is recomended, as it avoids issues like the Restore Action Plan being changed to a priority Action Plan. If you choose to override all Action Plans, then you will likely need to use something like the Action Plan Cascade feature to resolve these issues.
Here is an example of what this means in practice: you want to treat zone 7 as a high priority zone. If you put a high priority alarm Action Plan on Zone 1, and receive a burglary on zone 1, this creates a high priority alarm. As the operator you then complete the activation and then you receive a restoral from the same zone, this will create another high priority alarm. This is not how you would normally want the system to behave. To overcome this, you can assign create an alternate high priority Action Plan with a Signal Type of Cascade, and then assign this new action plan to the zone. A cascade Action Plan behaves just like a normal action plan, with the exception of the signal type, which is retrieved from the level 1 Action Plan. So repeating our example, the burglary still creates a high priority alarm (because the zone level cascade AP has a high priority, and the level 1 AP has a signal type of Zone Info), but when the restoral is received, the system treats this signal as a restoral (because the level 1 AP has a signal type of restoral). Cascade APs can also be used at User level, using the same logic.
So using individual action plan overrides at zone level will likely be easier to setup. These are commonly used in cases like Zone Bypass (override the Bypass Actionplan on the zones you wish to be treated as non priority events), and Trouble Bypass (again override the Trouble action plan on zones which you want to ignore trouble events).
