Locations

📍 Locations

Since 5.3.0 · #311 · Developer guide: Locations - Developer Guide

Locations are the places your organisation works from - sites, buildings, floors and rooms - kept as one tree. They live on System → Locations.

They started out in Assets, for saying where each piece of kit is. They describe the organisation rather than the kit, so they moved up to System, where other parts of FreeITSM can use them too. Nothing moved in the database: it is the same list, and every asset kept its location.

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Where to find them

Where	Who	What
System → Locations	Administrators	The tree, to add, rename, move and delete
Assets → Settings → Locations	Anyone with the Manage locations permission in Assets	The same tree, with a note that it is now used across FreeITSM (and, for an administrator, a link to System)

Both screens edit the same list, so a change in one shows in the other. The Assets tab stayed on purpose: System is for administrators only, and the asset managers who kept the list before should not need to become administrators to keep doing it. The Assets in-app help says where the list went, near the top of its first section.

Building the tree

• Add adds a top-level location. The + on any location adds one inside it.
• Edit (the pencil) renames a location or moves it under another parent. A location cannot be moved inside itself or one of its own sub-locations.
• Delete (the bin) is refused while a location has sub-locations. Assets at a deleted location are left with no location.
• Nest as deep or as shallow as you like, and each branch can differ: UK › London › Floor 2 beside a flat Data centre.

Companies and shared locations

On an install with more than one company, every location belongs to one company, and the tree shows the company chosen in the switcher in the top bar. A location such as a data centre that several companies use can be Shared with every company - see Shared asset locations for the rules.

Where locations are used

• Assets - each asset's Location.
• Forms - a Lookup field can search Locations, so a form can ask "Which office are you in?" and get a real location. Each one shows as its full path (UK > London > Floor 2), so two rooms called Floor 2 cannot be confused. Someone sees their own company's locations and the shared ones; tick Customers can use this on the portal to offer it on the portal. See Forms.

Next (#311): a location on people, tickets, contracts and projects, one at a time, and a Location reference type for CMDB properties (#312).

Upgrading

Nothing to do. There is no schema change; System → Locations appears for administrators straight away.