Scan, Tag and Crate From the Floor: APB360’s Mobile Asset API
The API behind APB360’s mobile scanning work is live and documented in the developer portal. It covers the full field workflow — scan a tag and learn what it is, register new assets, bind tags, pack items into cases, and record events — so inventory happens where the equipment is instead of on a clipboard that gets typed up later.
Tags With a Life Cycle
A tag is no longer either printed or not. Each one moves through Minted, Pending Print, Printed and Re-Printed, and every change is logged. A damaged tag that gets reprinted is visibly a reprint rather than an indistinguishable duplicate, and the current status travels with the tag everywhere it is looked up.
Cases That Hold Real Things
A case is a container with contents, not a packing list of what someone ought to receive. One case can hold a rifle and forty magazines together, with quantities for the items that carry no serial of their own.
Each case gets a short code in the form case- plus six characters, unique across every organization on the platform. The characters i, l, o and u are deliberately left out, because codes get read aloud over a radio and typed by someone wearing gloves. Lookups ignore capitalization, and codes issued under the older format keep working.
Location, Captured As You Work
- Every scan can carry a position — when the device reports one, the asset records it as its last known location
- Events and status changes keep their own — not just the asset’s latest position, but where each thing happened
- Bad readings are discarded — implausible or unusable coordinates are ignored rather than stored as fact
- Lookups return it — scanning a tag tells you where that asset was last seen, not only what it is
Dropdowns That Already Know Your Catalog
Mobile apps can pull your organization’s firearm catalog — manufacturers, models, types, calibers and lengths, plus the valid combinations between them — so a phone cascades its dropdowns the same way the portal does. The catalog is cleaned on the way out: duplicate names collapse together, blanks are dropped, and combinations that contradict each other are not offered. Fewer choices on a small screen, and fewer wrong ones.
Built for More Than One Person at a Time
Serial numbers are allocated from a counter rather than by reading the highest number already in use. Two people registering assets at the same moment on opposite sides of a warehouse receive different serials — a detail nobody notices until the day it is wrong, and an expensive one to untangle afterwards.
Full request and response samples are published in the APB360 developer portal. Building against it, or want your field workflow reviewed? Email sales@apb360.com.