Location values are one of the types of Field values.

They are used to store geographical data, like a street address or mailing address. The values are shown and edited as text (similar to a multi-line text field), but Dabble will try read the data to determine the country and, when appropriate, the region (such as the state or province) where the address is located.

The countries and regions represented in your data can be used to filter and group geographically similar Entries. In addition, you can use location fields to generate a Map view of your data showing numeric data in geographical terms. (Even without specific numeric data, you can simply map how many entries are located in particular areas.)

You can change a field to have a location value using the Field configuration. When you do this, existing data in the field will be maintained. If Dabble finds a country in the address, it will show the national flag of the country beside the value in the entry editor. In addition, there will be a map link which opens an external web site (Google Maps) using the location.

You can specify a default value for when new entries are created with this field. This only applies to the future: existing entries will not have their values changed.

Although you can filter entries by a location value, it’s often more useful to be able to do so more broadly — to limit entries by geographical area. To filter a Table view, you need to add a derived field from the column containing the location field.

You can derive the region, country and/or continent of location values.

Once you have one of these derived values in a column, you can use it to filter your entries.

You can also group entries by geographical area, but you do not need to add a derived field to do so (unless you want to rename the group).

Any table view which contains a location field as a column can be changed to Map view. If the entries are grouped by region, country or continent and there is a numeric column with subtotals active, then you can create maps using the numeric data. If not, then your map will simply show the number of entries in each geographical area.