Locations On Records Design

📍 A location on people, tickets, contracts and projects - design (#311)

The last part of #311. System → Locations (5.3.0) made locations one list for everything; this puts a location on the records that need one. Related: Locations · Locations - Developer Guide · Assets and All companies - design.

---

The shape

• People, tickets, contracts and projects each get one Location: a real location from System → Locations - the record's own company's, or a shared one - shown as its full path (UK > London > Floor 2).
• Built like the cost centre field, which already works this way on people and contracts: checked against the record's company, and checked again if the record moves company.
• Recorded in each record's history where it keeps one, in the REST API, and translated.

Decisions

Put to Ed on 15 November 2026. His answers are what is built.

Question	Decision	Why
A person's Location and the directory's Office text	A separate field. Office stays the text Active Directory, Entra or CardDAV fill in; Location is picked from the tree	No risk to directory sync, and no guessing which location "London HQ" means
Where a new ticket's Location comes from	The requester's location, by every route (email, portal, chat, catalogue, API, workflows...), editable - and a Tickets setting, on by default, so an install that does not want it can switch it off	Most tickets are about where the requester is; the setting keeps it optional. A requester who moves later does not change old tickets
Deleting a location that something points at	Refused while in use, with a pointer to a new tool - System → Maintenance → Locations in use - that lists everything using a location and moves it all to another location, or clears it	Nothing loses its location silently; the tool makes resolving it one step instead of hundreds of edits

Still to confirm: whether "refused while in use" also covers assets. Today, deleting a location clears it from its assets.

Not in this

• No mapping from the Office text to a location (it may come later as a Maintenance tool, if asked for).
• The rota's Office / WFH list (rota_locations) is a different thing and stays separate.