Define locations

Locations are used by various applications to locate users, facilities, or configuration items (CI).

You can configure different levels of location in a parent-child hierarchy. For example, an email server might be associated with a location of Second Floor, whereas the email business service might be associated with New York City.

Each level of this hierarchy contains a separate location record, with the next higher level specified as a parent. In this example each location is selectable as a hierarchy from reference fields:
Figure 1. Location hierarchy
The location is also used to generate a full identifier in the Full name field, which is available by configuring the form as follows.
Figure 2. Location Full name

Locations are stored in the Location [cmn_location] table.

Define a location

To create a location, navigate to User Administration > Locations and click New.
Table 1. Define a location
Field Description
Name The name of the location. This name is the display value that the system uses when referencing this location on a form.
Street The street address of the location.
City The city of the location.
State / Province State or province of the location.
Zip / Postal Code The zip or postal code of the location.
Country The country of the location.
Contact Name of a user who is the contact for this location.
Phone The phone number for the location.
Fax phone The fax number for the location.
Parent Name of the parent location for this location. Location hierarchies are described above.
Latitude The latitude of the location.

This field and the Longitude field described below are populated automatically by the get_lat_long business rule when the form contains enough information, such as an address or city name and a postal code.

Deactivate this business rule to prevent the system from overwriting any values entered manually into these fields.
Longitude The longitude of the location.
Fields that can be added by configuring the form:
Company A reference field to the Company [cmn_company] table.
Full name A read-only, calculated field that assembles the parent hierarchy of the location into a full name.
Stock room A boolean field that identifies whether the location is being used as a stock room.
Time zone The location's time zone. By default, the location uses the system time zone.

Map location

The latitude and longitude fields are populated by a business rule (get_lat_long) which queries the Google Map service. The more specific the location is, the more accurate the latitude and longitude are.

After the latitude and longitude are populated, Map Pages can be defined that display locations in an interactive map. For more information, see Map pages.
  • Latitude and longitude are expressed as a floating point data type. Previous releases expressed this information as a string. During an upgrade, the system converts the data where possible.