Ability to re-use an existing location

It should be a feature request as it's not currently possible with the location module. Perhaps a venue module would be a good idea to serve as a link between the location information and the node.

I think the best way to do this would be to change the schema (and some code) to allow users to have multiple addresses in their accounts. Basically, each user would have an 'address book' similar to how users can save multiple addresses to their account when doing yellow-page searches on Yahoo!. This mechanism will allow users to do a search with one location, and then change it to another location for another set of searches. For nodes, multiple locations will be a little trickier, but for now, I'd be willing to review/commit a patch from someone that allows for:

(1) Addition of multiple addresses in "My Account >> location(s)" or something. Saving multiple addresses would require schema updates to the location table since we currently have a primary key made out of (type, oid) where the type is either 'node' or 'user' and the oid is just an integer for an nid or uid depending on the type. My suggestion would be the addition of an additional 'lid' ("location id"?) column or something that could be the primary key for each location. This would make it easier to later modify the code to allow for multiple locations being assigned to node.

(2) The addition, to each location form that shows up on a node form, of a drop down select of addresses currently in the user's address book. If the user doesn't have any, the drop down is not included. I think this could go directly into location form.

(3) Finally, the location saving form on each node submit would have to have a way of figuring out whether to use a location that was submitted, or the 'location id' that has been selected from the aforementioned drop down select.

subscribing, and will look into it.

possible approach would be to have a drop-down list that shows "Location names" by fetching them from the location table. By selecting one available location name the details would be filled in immediately with some javascript.

Or creating a new table, that simply stores already used locations. This would save some query time, as the first approach has to check all the rows.

I think the ideal solution would be to have auto completion turned on for the location input fields. I am a very beginner, if a dev could look at it i am sure he could do it much faster than me.

To avoid querying too much i suggest progressively narrowing queries: lets suppose we have 3 fields: Location name (ideal for custom inputs), Country, City.

We first type in Country, that is already using auto completion (or a select list based on already existing countries + a checkbox to add country if not in database), then we can narrow the query when typing in city to the particular country we already selected, then type in location name, which is an even narrower set of words.

This basically solves the problem of reusing existing locations, and would also remove the huge dropdown list for countries, which is not very user-friendly anyway.

The solution I worked out for my project resulted in the autonode module. This issue here is not a location issue for the following reason: location gives you an API to assign locative information to a node. thats it, no more. You should avoid assigning multiple nodes to the same location, as it gives nothing informative, but overlaps on representation such as gmaps.

My opininon that this request is by design not in the location module, the solution is to use reference nodes, and create custom nodes for the location nodes where you display its child nodes in some form.

While I think I see what you mean, a number of us were looking for an ability to manage venues (booking seats etc as in cinemas, theatres, restaurants, conference rooms, lecture theatres etc.) in which case clearly a single venue would have multiple nodes.

Do you feel autonode is the right answer there too?