Add entities for containers, boxes, and shelves of some sort to track item locations

[Kanellaman]

What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature?

Currently, Homebox allows users to track items, but there is no way to assign items to specific physical storage units such as containers, boxes, or shelves. This makes it difficult to know where each item is stored, especially for users who have many items organized in physical spaces.

What is the solution you are proposing?

I propose adding new entity types to Homebox:

• Containers, boxes, and shelves
  This would allow users to create these units and assign items to them. Users could then easily see which items are stored in which unit and query where a specific item is located.

Features could include:

• Create and manage containers, boxes, shelves
• Assign items to these units
• View all items within a specific unit
• Query which unit an item resides in

What alternatives have you considered?

Some alternatives and related ideas:

• Using tags or custom fields to indicate storage location, which can work but lacks the structure and relationships of dedicated entities.
• External spreadsheets or notes to manually track item locations, which are less efficient and not integrated with Homebox.

Additional context

No response

Contributions

• I have searched through existing ideas in the discussions to check if this is a duplicate

[tankerkiller125]

This will be resolved by the #678 PR

Also Locations can have parents, you can always just treat a container as a location Something like Basement -> Shelf Rack 1 -> Shelf 2 -> Container 3 is possible via locations, or even item parent, child relationships.

[Eternal21]

I started using Homebox, because I had about 20 of those 27gal Home Depot totes filled with tools and various items, and I literally had to open every single one to find what I was looking for.

I currently use parent-child relationship. I created 20 items for containers, and then use those as parents for the items stored inside. I also leverage the automatic asset ids to name the containers. For example:
Container 000-001, Container 000-002 etc.

I even had other boxes that went inside those containers, and created dedicated parent items for those, for example:
Box 000-020, Box 000-021

So a hammer could be inside:
Garage > Container 000-001 > Box 000-021 > Hammer

It's been working great so far (about 1000 items in), but I did notice some weirdness especially when moving a container from one location to another. The child items would still show as being present in old location. That despite enabling Sync child items' locations toggle.

Another issue was that the full path to the child item is not shown. For the previous example, you will see something like this:
Garage > Box 000-021 > Hammer, instead of the expected:
Garage > Container 000-001 > Box 000-021 > Hammer

The only solution for now is clicking on the Box 000-021, at which point you can see the following and know what container it's in:
Garage > Container 000-001 > Box 000-021

[Viper00o]

I have the same problem with roll around tool chests and drawers. The question is when is a object an item and when is it a location? I think that the parent item is a terrible way to handle the hierarchy of things that are more a location than an item. There should be a flag on items so that they can be used as locations. I have a workshop that has a rack that holds bins that hold items. Most of those are locations but you really need pictures for these locations to make it crystal clear. Where is location B3 in the rack? When you move a tool you change its location not it's parent.

I'm 500 items in and I'm very afraid I've made some bad choices on item vs location and it will bite me in the future. We need a Wiki with case studies and example that show best practices.

[tankerkiller125]

PRs for the docs are always welcome. If people want to submit case studies, user documentation, etc. they are more than welcome to do so.