Properties, Entrances, and Units

Properties

A Property is the central entity of facilioo and represents a building or a group of buildings that is owned, rented, or leased by an individual, a company, or an organization. This is the top-level physical structure and may consist of multiple entrances and, further below, units.

Entrances

An Entrance is a point of access to a property. It serves as the physical entryway used by residents, service providers, or guests. Each entrance belongs to exactly one property, but a property can have multiple entrances—such as front, rear, or side entrances to a building or complex.

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Relationship between Properties and Entrances

Due to historical reasons, properties and entrances are stored in the same table in facilioo.
Therefore, the old system does not distinguish between properties and entrances and refers to them collectively as objects.
Units (formerly flats) could be attached to an object back then.

The new API model now distinguishes between properties and entrances and only allows units to be connected to entrances (in theory).
To remain compatible with the legacy model, each property automatically has a surrogate entrance. When a property is created, an implicit entrance is created as well, using the same values and the same ID.
In practice, this means that every property always has an entrance with the same ID as the property itself.

Because of this shared structure, properties and entrances can sometimes behave a bit interchangeable within the API. For example:

• In many cases, you can provide an Entrance ID to endpoints that expect a Property ID, and you will receive equivalent or very similar results.
• The same works the other way around in several endpoints.
• Some entities such as Inquiries, Documents, Units, and similar resources allow attaching a PropertyId, but in certain scenarios this may actually refer to an entrance internally.

However, this flexibility mainly exists for compatibility and convenience. It is generally recommended to pass an actual PropertyId whenever an endpoint explicitly asks for one.
Entrances should primarily be used for organizing and structuring a property (e.g., building sections, staircases, etc.).

To reliably determine whether a returned entity is a property or an entrance—regardless of which endpoint returned it—the API provides the IsProperty flag.

• If IsProperty == true, the entity is a real property.
• If IsProperty == false, the entity represents an entrance.

You can rely on this flag to interpret the result correctly.

Additionally, the PropertyId field helps identify the underlying property context:

• If the returned entity is a property, the PropertyId will be the same as the entity’s ID.
• If the returned entity is an entrance, the PropertyId will contain the ID of the property the entrance belongs to.

Units

A Unit represents an individual, addressable part of a property—such as a flat, office, commercial space, or even a garage or parking space (see all here). Units are accessible through one or more entrances and are the primary entities associated with occupants or service requests. Each unit belongs to a single entrance.

Technical Unit

In some business cases, a process, inquiry, or other domain object must be linked to a unit, even though the case is not related to a specific physical unit, but rather to an entire property or entrance.

To support these scenarios without introducing a separate entity type, facilioo uses a convention-based concept called a technical unit.

A technical unit is a regular unit entity that follows a well-defined pattern and acts as a placeholder for property- or entrance-wide cases.

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Technical units are an implementation convention, not a separate entity type.

A technical unit is a unit created with the following fixed characteristics:

• Number: "000"
• Position: "Allgemein"
• UnitType: 2 => "sonstiges"

Additionally:

• A property can or should have at most one technical unit (in theory, you could create more manually with the above parameters)
• The technical unit is ideally assigned to the property directly
• It represents general, non-unit-specific matters

There are dedicated endpoints for fetching and creating technical units at GET|PUT api/properties/{id}/technical-unit. To delete a technical unit, use the regular DELETE api/units/{id} endpoint.

Component Entities

These entities are directly associated with and dependent on Properties, Entrances, or Units. They represent detailed, specialized data components that extend the core information of their parent entities to support specific operational and management tasks.

• Consumption Meters
  Manage consumption meters and track their usage data at two levels: Property Level and Unit Level. Each having distinctive mechanisms.
• Attributes
  Customizable metadata organized in attribute groups and values, attached to properties, entrances, or units to capture tailored information for diverse operational needs.