Equipment Categories

Every piece of gear belongs to exactly one category. OneTake uses a fixed list of 15 categories plus one fallback. You pick from this list when adding or editing an item — there's no free-text category entry.

If a piece of gear doesn't fit any category, use Other / Uncategorised.

Categories by group

Categories are organised into three groups. Each group has its own icon, which appears next to category options in dropdowns throughout the app — when adding gear, editing it, and filtering your inventory list.

The group affects the icon shown alongside the category, but doesn't limit what gear you can put in it.

Signal Chain

Instruments & Backline

Infrastructure

Fallback

Use Other / Uncategorised for anything that doesn't fit the categories above. Off-vocabulary values (for example, entries from a CSV import that don't match any category even after case-folding) also show the fallback icon.

Exact spelling matters in most contexts

The category values are stored with the exact casing shown above. The in-app forms (add gear, edit gear) use a controlled dropdown, so casing is handled for you. Two things to watch when importing via CSV:

• Outboard — Dynamics & EQ uses an em dash (—, U+2014), not a hyphen.
• Cables, Stands & Accessories includes a comma after "Cables".
• Other / Uncategorised uses the en-GB spelling ("Uncategorised", not "Uncategorized").

Case folding in CSV import

When importing gear via CSV, OneTake normalises the category column case-insensitively before saving. A value like microphones or MICROPHONES is stored as Microphones — it keeps its category rather than falling back to Other / Uncategorised. Punctuation and spelling still need to match exactly (after casing is stripped); a near-miss like Mics does not resolve to Microphones.

A value that doesn't resolve after case-folding is treated as off-vocabulary and saved as Other / Uncategorised. Off-vocabulary rows are never rejected — the import still succeeds.

Database enforcement

OneTake enforces the category vocabulary at two layers:

• Forms and CSV import — the add-gear and edit forms use a constrained dropdown, so only valid values can be selected. The CSV importer normalises values and falls back to Other / Uncategorised for anything unrecognised.
• Database — a CHECK constraint on both the equipment.category and custom_service_templates.category_match columns rejects any direct write that doesn't match one of the 16 canonical strings (or NULL). This means a direct database or API write of an off-vocabulary value is rejected outright rather than silently stored.

Because the vocabulary is now enforced at the database layer, adding or renaming a category in a future OneTake release requires a database migration to widen the constraint alongside the code change.

Categories and service templates

The same category list is used when a service template specifies which gear it applies to. When a template has a Suggested for category set, OneTake surfaces that template first for items in the matching category.

Template matching is case-insensitive — an item stored with non-canonical casing (for example, a legacy row written before the controlled vocabulary was enforced) still receives suggestions for its category.

See Service templates for more on applying templates to gear.