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Rather than delete and re-add, is there any way to replace a floor plan?

The only thing you can do is delete and re-add.  There's no way, at this time, to just replace the floor plan.

Different ideas have been thrown around for this.  If you have any good suggestions, we'd love to hear any ideas on how to improve this.

The reason for deleting and re-adding the floor plan is due to the final image used for mapping.  Original floor plan was added with height / width dimensions, these dimensions are converted to a scheme of x,y coordinates on a grid.  Any devices added also have x,y coordinates matching this image's grid.  The x,y coordinate scheme as you can tell, is the sole reason replacing the floor plan won't work in the current implementation.  There's no guarantee that the replacement image will have the same exact scaling and cropping of white space for x,y coordinates to be consistent with the already learned coordinates.

Ultimately, the need to delete and re-add floor plans for replacement forces users to redo some work, but increases the chance that they'll have accurate placement of devices on floor plans in VisualRF.

Honestly, this should not be too hard to implement. You can already re-scale a floorplan, and set origin point. When bringing in a new background you should scale, and set a matching origin point, and it should be roughly accurate. 

You may see it as just a small amount of work, however I deal with floorplans that update regularly:

- In new facilities we need to make initial plans prior to internals being completely finalized. Because Airwave does not allow replacement of the background, this forces us to either work off of old prints or re-create manually on new prints. Perhaps just a few walls changed, and now we have to completely re-create the design. This is a huge waste of time and source of major frustration.

- In existing facilities we have the same issue. We may re-work an area and move things around, and now must re-create a live floorplan with deployed APs if we are to be able to reference anything current.

Replacing the background image is an essential, fundamental requirement and it's pretty dissapointing Aruba has not understood that.

Maybe Aruba needs users to make the case for that.  The majority of users' floor plans do not change, BUT if we implemented something that would work, we would have to make it work for everyone, which requires time, effort, focus groups, etc.  A good starting point is to request it in the first place, if you have not done so already, so that we can gauge interest :  https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/cp/ideas/ideaList.apexp

Perhaps no formal feature request has gotten enough attention, but if you search the forums this is a reoccuring theme for quite a few years. It's even been acknowledged as far back as 2011 as a feature request that should be in the works, though there's been no sign of it.

Thanks for the input.  I'm forwarding this thread to our Product Team.  While the request for a floor plans replacement feature has been reported a few times, the prior customer reports were okay with having to delete and re-upload floor plans due to not having to do this operation for many floor plans (usually less than 5 in most cases).  Your usage case is unique to theirs in that your building plans are more fluid with periodic wall changes.

Appreciated!

Any word on this yet?

No word yet.  I do see that some investigation tasks have been added to our backlog to look into methods to enforce a replacement, but these tasks have not been scheduled yet.  Strongest path is to make sure to upvote the feature request in the ideas portal, notify Sales team, and bring it up in any convos you have with the AirWave product team.

Thank you for the quick reply.  Where do I find the Ideas Portal?

Thank you

I see a link when I navigate to support.arubanetworks.com, Contact US tab, under the Contact Support box, there's a link to Ideas Portal (but I don't have any further permissions to validate the link).

This request was posted to the idea portal 4/6/2016. It has garnered a couple comments including one stating "this is something we should do.  I'm tracking it as US14820, and it's under consideration for later this year" from Airwave Product Manager Dan Comfort.

I have pressed via our sales team as well. It seems as though it will get added but there is so far no indication when that will take place.

In the meantime I have been ssh'ing into Airwave, copying the background image file locally, editing in photoshop to match pixel-for-pixel a new background, and then replacing the original file on Airwave. Clunky and involved but faster than re-creating entire floorplans.

https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/cp/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=08733000000HBeo&lsr=0#comments