Locations

Locations are the places your things live, kept as a tree. A workshop holds shelves, a shelf holds bins, a bin holds parts. You build the tree to match your space.

Areas and containers

Every location is one of two kinds:

• An area is a place in your space, named at whatever level is useful. The building you're in, the rooms inside it, a shelving rack, and a single shelf on that rack are all areas. Areas are the structure of where things are, nested as deep as you want.
• A container is a holder you put things into and can move around: a bin, a box, a tote. It sits in an area, but it's the vessel, not the place, and you can carry it somewhere else with its contents.

Containers get a number appended automatically, so typing Bin gives you Bin 17 and typing Drawer gives you Drawer 18, without you tracking the count. The number is the next one free across all your containers, so each one is unique to label and scan. Type your own number and it's left as you wrote it.

When you scan to file things away, the scans work down this tree like a funnel: each scan narrows one level, from area to container to item. QR labels covers the flow.

Creating a location

On the New location form, Kind is two buttons, Area and Container, each showing what it means, instead of a dropdown. Cobblr guesses which one from the name as you type: "White Bookshelf" or "Kitchen Drawer" pre-select Container, "Storage Room" or "Workshop Corner" pre-select Area. The guess only sets the default, so tapping a button yourself always wins.

When you need a place partway through another form, filling out a part and realizing the bin doesn't exist yet, add it without leaving the form. The creator opens inline, right where you are, instead of stacking a second popup.

Keeping them in order

Locations sort in natural number order everywhere, so Bin 2 comes before Bin 10, not after it. Drag any location by its handle to set the order within its group, and that order is kept everywhere locations appear: the dropdown on a part, machine, or asset, the Labels browser, and any module that lists your places. You arrange them once.

On the Locations page, Areas (rooms and regions) and Unsorted containers (loose bins not yet filed into an area) get their own headings, so the two kinds never blur together. The Locations page and the Labels browser draw from one shared tree, so their structure and order can't drift apart.

Floor plans

Once you have drawn a plan, the Locations page opens on a Floor Plan tab, so the plans are the first thing you see rather than buried inside each location. Pick any room or container from the chips to see its layout: rooms draw top-down, containers draw as a front elevation so drawers and shelves show at true scale. A List tab holds the familiar tree of every place, and a fresh workspace with nothing drawn yet opens there instead of on a blank canvas.

A location's detail page can hold a to-scale 2D plan. Give the room its real size in whatever unit you think in (33ft by 24ft, or 7.3m), draw interior walls with gaps for doors, and place your racks, benches, and bins where they stand. Every rectangle on the plan is one of your locations: click it to open it, and in edit mode drag to move it or corner-drag to resize. Dropping something inside a box files it there, so the plan is a filing surface, not a picture. The everyday view shows no numbers; dimensions appear only while you edit.

To fill a parts rack without drawing 24 bins by hand, use + grid in edit mode: give it rows and columns and a naming scheme (A1…C8, or Bin 1…24) and it creates and places the whole set at true scale in one shot. Each bin is an ordinary location afterward, ready to scan, label, and fill.

Each layout has its own snap grid, set in edit mode. The garage keeps a coarse 100 mm default, but a toolbox drawer can be set to 42 mm for exact Gridfinity, or whatever one square means to you. Positions and sizes snap to it, and the panel reads sizes in grid units next to the millimeters.

Plans hold the things themselves, not only sub-bins. A machine, an asset, or a part filed here can each take a cell; anything located here but not yet placed waits in an "items here, not placed" strip until you drop it. A placed rectangle can carry a photo of the real thing or a silhouette outline, so the wrench drawer's plan can look like the drawer.

If drawing feels like work, hit describe and say it in a sentence ("3 bays, 24ft deep, partition, bay 3 is 11ft"). Cobblr drafts the plan and you drag it true. Describe also places furniture you name, matched to sub-locations you already have; it never creates or moves anything you placed yourself.

Whole houses

A building doesn't get one plan. On a house (an area with no plan of its own), hit Split into floors: each floor gets its own outline and appears as a tab on the house's page ("Main floor", "Basement"). Rooms draw on a floor as visible rectangles; click a room to zoom into its own plan in place, fully editable. Dropping something inside a room's rectangle files it into that room and lands it on the room's plan at the same spot.

Working from the plan

Every plan's toolbar has three buttons. Scan into opens the camera already filing into that space; from inside a room it arms that room directly. Heat shades each box by how much is stored in it, counting everything inside a room, so the darkest boxes are where your stuff actually lives. Print opens a paper-white copy in a new tab, one page per floor, ready for the wall.

Members can view a read-only plan through the portal, at /portal/<workspace>/locations/<id>/plan.

Shared across everything

Locations aren't tied to one module. Inventory parts, assets, and machines all point at the same set of places, so "where is it" means the same thing everywhere and you define your locations only once.

Assigning a location

When you give something a location, the picker shows your areas as a grid of chips. Tap an area's name to pick it, or tap its count to open that area's containers in a panel right there, one area at a time, with a shelf's bins indented under the shelf. Containers that live in no area sit in a Loose containers group. A location that's already set opens to view when you go to change it.

Using them

Give an item a location and you can group or filter any view by it: everything on Shelf 3, everything in the garage. Paired with QR labels, a location can carry a code you scan to see what's meant to be there.