All About Locations & Stores

Locations or stores define the places that you physically trade from. A location can be either a physical store where sales are made, or a warehouse holding stock

1. If the location is physically seperate and holds stock, it is generally a new location. However, if you have two warehouses in close proximity and wish to move stock between them without paperwork, then treat them as one location
2. If the location is a physical place where you sell from, create it as a location. This allow reports to report the effectiveness of each physical locations.
3. Large stores that span multiple floors are still generally considered one location
4. Internet and eCommerce sites are generally one location for each website that generates sales. Similar to physical stores, this allows you to report the effectiveness of different websites and brands.

Available Fields

The following fields are available in the database for locations. This is subject to specific site setup. Site specific fields may also be available, which are not shown below. If the list below does not include a required attribute and it is common across an industry segment we may be able to add it as a general attribute

Remarks

A value of -1 for location_id is permitted for exceptional circumstances. This is sometimes needed when integrating with external systems. The location numbered -1 should not be used for general use

A value of 0 for a location_id is tolerated but discouraged. Again this can be helpful when integrating external systems. There are some restrictions

• The Fieldpine system will essentially attempt to "ignore" this row in the database. Whenever we fetch locations we will explicitly ignore location_id=0 (where possible)
• It cannot be maintained via any API.
• It may not be readable via any API

Locations can be imported into the system using a Excel spreadsheet with one location definition per line. You may load as few or many fields as you wish.

Consider you wish to load a list of locations, consisting of Name, Phone and a Marketing blurb. You would create an Excel spreadsheet as shown.

Name	Phone	IntroEn
Queen Street	123 456	In the heart of the city this iconic destination ...
Mall of America	9876 5432	Specialising in items for the whole family...

Spreadsheet Rules

1. The first line in the spreadsheet contains a heading line detailing what is in each column. These heading names must be taken from the "Available Fields" table shown below. You may use either the "Name" or one of the "Alternative Names" as your column heading. Headings other than these may not be recognised and information will typically be ignored on load
2. Values supplied must be exact, as information wont always be read by a human.

3. Do not list multiple values in one cell, unless that fields explicitly states it can support a list. Often this will be a pipe-seperated list, eg "Large|Medium" to supply two values, large and medium.

4. Only supply information you know, terms such as "dont know", "TBS", "TBC", "n/a" are meaningless to a computer at this stage.

Link: More information on Excel Bulk Load

Locations information can be read by several API protocols depending on your requirements

Retail API (Read)

The Retail API retrives location information on the following URL.

	GET http://your-server/RetailApi/location/NNN

Where NNN can be any of the following:

• A single location number id number ("Locid"). Example

  GET /RetailApi/location/12

• A single location key ("Key"). Example

  GET /RetailApi/location/AB733FHDG304H5HF73H558

Information returned is in the following format

Location {
	"Locid": 12,
	"Key": "AB733FHDG304H5HF73H558",
	"Name": "Bobs Burgers",
	"FormalName": "Acme Trading (2005) Ltd T/A Bobs Burgers",
	...  More Fields
}

eLink API (Read)