Sync an EarthRanger event type to CMORE

This tutorial walks you through connecting EarthRanger to CMORE so that when a ranger reports an event in EarthRanger, it appears in CMORE — on the map, in the message feed, and classified with a CMORE tag — within minutes, with no re-typing.

We use one concrete example the whole way: the Rhino Carcass event type. By the end you will have reported a rhino carcass in EarthRanger and watched it arrive in CMORE looking like this:

Everything in this guide is point-and-click in three web portals. You do not need to write code or call APIs.

← Overview

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What you're building

Three systems cooperate, and each is configured in its own portal:

EarthRanger  ──►  Gundi  ──►  CMORE
(rangers          (routes and     (your partners see the
 report events)    translates)     event, tagged, on their map)

• EarthRanger is where events are reported.
• Gundi (gundiservice.org) is the data-sharing platform that polls EarthRanger for new events, translates them into CMORE's format, and delivers them.
• CMORE is where the events land, in your organisation's share group, classified with a CMORE tag.

You configure each piece once. After that the pipeline runs by itself.

Prerequisites

You need working logins for all three systems:

System	You need	Example used here
EarthRanger	A site login that can report events	gundi-dev.staging.pamdas.org
Gundi portal	An account in your organisation	gundiservice.org
CMORE	A user in your organisation's share group, with the Integration permission	cmorewc1.chpc.ac.za

CMORE URLs are instance-specific. Every CMORE deployment has its own address — there is no single global CMORE server. This guide's screenshots use the cmorewc1.chpc.ac.za test instance; substitute your own instance's URL wherever one appears. For example, on the DFFE environment the portal is https://cmore.csir.co.za and the API base is https://cmore.csir.co.za/za/WebAPI/api. If you don't know your instance's URL, ask your CMORE administrator.

Ask your CMORE administrator (CSIR) for these — they are not self-service:

1. An organisation (share group) on the CMORE instance, with your CMORE user in it. Organisations and share groups are created by the CMORE team.
2. The Integration permission on your CMORE account. Creating and managing an external service (Part 1.2) requires it. The check is self-evidencing: if the Admin Site shows the Service menu and you can create a service and view its API key, you have the permission. If the Service menu is missing, you don't — contact the CMORE team.
3. Access to the tag domain you need. Tags live in tag domains (for example, the Wildlife domain contains Rhino Carcass, Poacher Sighting, Wounded Rhino and 14 more). Your share group can only use tags from domains it has been granted. Domains you don't have simply don't appear anywhere in your screens, and some — including Wildlife, which is marked as Stop Rhino Poaching intellectual property — are restricted and granted case-by-case. Tell the CMORE team which tags you want to use and which share group needs them.

These three grants are independent — having one doesn't imply the others. In particular, successfully creating a service and API key (item 2) does not mean your share group or tag domains are set up; those can still fail later, at delivery time.

Everything else in this guide — creating the service, getting the API key, finding your share group ID, mapping fields — you can do yourself.

Part 1: Set up the CMORE side

In this part you create a service in CMORE (an identity for the integration), get its API token, and note your share group ID. You'll paste these three things into Gundi in Part 2.

CMORE has two web interfaces, and this part uses both:

• the Web Portal (the map view you normally use), and
• the Cmore Admin Site, opened from the portal via the gears icon in the top-right toolbar (hover text "Manage Users"). It opens in a new tab.

1.1 Open the Cmore Admin Site

1. Sign in to the CMORE Web Portal.

1. Click the gears icon in the top-right toolbar. A new tab opens with the Cmore Admin Site. The left menu has Manage Users, Manage Tag Shortcuts, Manage Tags, Service, and Log.

1.2 Create the service and get its API token

1. In the left menu, click Service. You'll see the External Services list — every integration identity your organisation has.

Don't see Service in the menu? Your CMORE account lacks the Integration permission — ask the CMORE team to grant it (see Prerequisites).

1. Click Create New Service. Enter a Unique Id (short, no spaces — e.g. earthranger-prod) and a Display Name (e.g. EarthRanger), then click Create.

1. Back in the list, click View on your new service. The service page shows an API Key section with the Auth Token — this is the token Gundi will use. Copy it somewhere safe.

If the token is ever exposed, come back here and click GenerateNewToken — it invalidates the old token immediately. Remember to paste the new one into Gundi (Part 2.2).

1.3 Link the service to your share group

The token only works when the service points at your share group.

1. On the service page click Edit.
2. Set Target Group ID to your share group's numeric ID and set State to Active, then Save.

Where do I find my share group ID? If your organisation already has a working service, its Target Group section shows it (e.g. ShareGroup — ID 8334 — Earth Ranger Integration). If not, ask the CMORE team for your share group's ID when they create it — the web portal shows your group's name (top toolbar and profile) but not its number.

1. Note down the Target Group ID — Gundi calls it the Owner Group ID and you'll enter it again in Part 2.2.

1.4 Confirm you can see the tags you need

1. Still in the Admin Site, click Manage Tags. Domains granted to your organisation are listed — here, Wildlife with its 17 tags.

1. Click the domain name to see its tags and which share groups are assigned. Confirm your share group appears under Assigned ShareGroups.

1. Cross-check in the Web Portal: click New Event on the messages tile. The "Choose a tag" screen must show the tags your events will use (e.g. Rhino Carcass under Wildlife). If a tag is missing here, it will be silently dropped from delivered events — go back to the prerequisites box and contact the CMORE team.

You now have the three values Part 2 needs: the API token, the API base URL (your CMORE instance's server + /za/WebAPI/api — e.g. https://cmore.csir.co.za/za/WebAPI/api on DFFE, or https://cmorewc1.chpc.ac.za/za/WebAPI/api on the test instance used here), and the Owner Group ID.

Part 2: Configure the Gundi destination

In this part you point Gundi at CMORE: enter the credentials, test them, and tell Gundi how to translate the Rhino Carcass event type into the CMORE Rhino Carcass tag.

2.1 Open your connection's CMORE destination

1. Sign in to the Gundi portal and open Connections, then your connection. A connection links a source (your EarthRanger site) to one or more destinations (CMORE). Its page has five tabs: General, Provider, Destinations, Sources, and Logs. Open the Destinations tab — your CMORE destination is listed there.

1. Click the CMORE destination to open its Configuration tab. It has the destination's name and URL at the top, then an Auth section and a Deliver section.

2.2 Fill in Auth and test it

1. In the Auth section, enter the three values from Part 1:

Field	Value
API Base URL	your CMORE instance's server + /za/WebAPI/api (e.g. https://cmore.csir.co.za/za/WebAPI/api on DFFE) — note it ends with /za/WebAPI/api, not just the host
API Token	the service's Auth Token (paste the raw value — the field shows it masked)
Owner Group ID	your share group's numeric ID (the service's Target Group ID, e.g. 8334)

1. Save, then click Test Connection (top right of the Auth section). This checks the token against your CMORE server before any data flows — it catches a bad token or wrong URL immediately. You want the green Valid Credentials result:

2.3 Map the event type to a CMORE tag

Without a mapping, events still arrive in CMORE — description, location, and a link back to EarthRanger — but unclassified. The mapping is what fills in the structured tag fields.

Why unclassified matters: an unclassified event is visible on the map, but it's invisible to everything in CMORE that keys off classification — tag-based filtering and lookups, analytics, reporting, dashboards, and rule-based workflows will not include it. If you want an event type to count anywhere beyond the map view, it needs a mapping.

In Deliver, add an entry to Event type → CMORE tag:

1. Gundi event_type: rhino_carcass — the EarthRanger event type's internal name (ask your EarthRanger admin, or check the event type's value in the ER admin — it's the lowercase name with underscores, not the display name).
2. CMORE Tag: the tag's ID (preferred — it keeps working if the tag is ever renamed; the scaffold-mapping tool's legend shows it, and the portal's dropdown stores it automatically) or the tag name Rhino Carcass spelled exactly as in CMORE's tag chooser.
3. Field Mappings — one row per detail you want carried over. Our test system maps six:

Gundi event_details key (from ER)	CMORE field (name or ID)
animal_sex	Animal Sex
age_of_animal	Animal Age
age_of_carcass	Carcass Age
cause_of_death	Kill Type
animal_id	Skull Tag Number
animal_common_name	Rhino Spesies

(Yes, "Rhino Spesies" — use CMORE's spelling exactly as it appears in the tag.) Field IDs work here too and are rename-proof — the scaffold tool emits them for you.

1. Value Mappings — only needed when EarthRanger's stored value and CMORE's option don't obviously match. Matching ignores case and punctuation, so ER male finds CMORE Male on its own. But EarthRanger's age classes don't look anything like CMORE's, so Animal Age gets explicit rows: a_0-3_months → Calf, b_3_months1_year → Sub-Adult, d_2-3.5years → Adult, and so on. Likewise Black Rhino → Black for the species field. Any value that can't be matched is dropped from the tag (and logged) rather than sent as garbage — unmapped values never break delivery, they just leave that one field empty.

1. Save the configuration.

Shortcut for many fields: authoring mappings by hand gets tedious for tag-heavy event types (CMORE's Rhino Carcass tag has 26 fields). Your integration engineer can generate a mapping automatically with the scaffold-mapping tool — see Configuration.

Part 3: Connect EarthRanger and choose what to share

The EarthRanger side of the connection controls which events leave EarthRanger and how often Gundi checks for new ones.

1. On the connection page, open the Provider tab. It holds the EarthRanger side: the ER Auth token (with its own Test Connection button) and a Pull Events section. The credentials are usually set once, when the connection is first created.
2. In Pull Events, make sure Event Types includes rhino_carcass — or is left empty so all event types flow. This filter is the reason an event type can work in ER yet never reach CMORE.
3. Confirm the Run On Schedule toggle is on — that's what makes Gundi poll EarthRanger automatically (typically every few minutes; new events appear in CMORE after the next run).

Want photos to come along too? Also turn on Forward Event Attachments in the same Pull Events section (it's off by default). Files attached to the ER event — photos, documents — then arrive in CMORE as media comments on the delivered event. Photos added after the event was first shared are picked up on a later polling run. This also needs a one-time storage-access setup on the integration side — if you turn it on and attachments don't arrive, see Troubleshooting.

Part 4: See it work

Time to prove the pipeline end-to-end.

1. In EarthRanger, open Events and click the Create Event button (or use the + button on the map). In the Add Event dialog, pick Rhino Carcass (under its category, e.g. Monitoring).
2. Fill in the fields you mapped in Part 2.3 — for the test at least Animal Sex, Age of Animal, and Animal Common Name, so you can see both an automatic match and a value mapping at work — plus notes that make it obviously a test, and save.

1. Wait one polling interval (Part 3, step 3), then open the CMORE Web Portal. Your event appears at the top of the message feed, titled with the event's EarthRanger title.
2. Click it. The Event Detail window shows:
3. the description and location from EarthRanger,
4. the Rhino Carcass tag with the mapped fields filled in,
5. a comment with a link back to the EarthRanger event, so anyone in CMORE can click through to the source,
6. source Generated, meaning it was posted by the integration, not typed by a person, and
7. if you attached a photo in EarthRanger and enabled Forward Event Attachments (Part 3), the photo as a media comment on the event.

In our test run, "White Rhino / Sub-adult / Female" from EarthRanger arrived as "White / Sub-Adult / Female" in CMORE — the value mappings and automatic matching from Part 2.3, working exactly as configured.

That's the whole loop. From here on, every rhino_carcass event your rangers report is shared automatically. To share more event types, repeat Part 2.3 (one mapping entry per event type) — and check the tag's domain is granted (Part 1.4).

If something doesn't look right

Symptom	Most likely cause	Where to look
Event arrives in CMORE but without the tag	Tag name misspelled in the mapping, or your share group can't see the tag's domain	Events post, but the structured tag is missing
Tag is there but one field is empty	That value needs a Value Mapping (Part 2.3, step 4)	A specific lookup value is dropped
Nothing arrives in CMORE at all	Event type not in the ER share filter, or routing/credentials problem	Nothing reaches the runner at all
Test Connection fails	Wrong token, wrong base URL (must end in /za/WebAPI/api), or service not Active / not linked to your group (Part 1.3)	re-run Part 1.2–1.3, then Test Connection again
No link back to EarthRanger on the event	Deep-link comment issue	The source deep link doesn't appear in CMORE
Photos on the event don't arrive	Forward Event Attachments toggle off, or storage access not set up	Attachments don't appear in CMORE

For anything deeper, the Gundi portal's activity log on the connection shows what was delivered, skipped, or errored — and the Troubleshooting page covers each case in detail.

← Overview