Linked records on the card
A person in Attio belongs to a company; a company holds contracts. The card can bring one level of that onto the issue, so an agent does not have to open Attio to find out which plan the customer is on.
One level, and no further. An attribute of a linked record that is itself a link to a third record is left out of the card entirely, because resolving it would need another round of lookups the card does not make and would print an identifier where a name should be.
#Two ways a linked record appears
A project chooses, per linked object, which of these it wants. The choice is about how much room a record takes, not about two different designs.
Setting | What an agent sees |
|---|---|
"Show inline" | A small bounded box inside the field's value: the record's name at the top as the link into Attio, its picture beside the name where it has one, and its attributes listed beneath. The box is what says these values belong to the linked record and not to the customer. |
"Show on hover" | The record's name on one line, with a chevron button beside it. The same name, the same picture and the same attributes at the same sizes appear when the panel is opened. |
A linked record with no attributes chosen for it is left as an ordinary link, with no box drawn round it and no chevron, because a box drawn around a single link says nothing.
Collapsed does not mean not loaded Keeping a linked record behind its link hides it, it does not defer fetching it. The attributes are already on the card when it is drawn, so revealing them is instant, never shows a spinner, and costs no additional call to Attio in either mode. The collapsed mode exists for room: three linked licences with eight attributes each would fill a narrow sidebar that the agent wanted for the customer's own fields.
#Opening a collapsed record
Input | How it opens | How it closes |
|---|---|---|
Mouse | Rest anywhere on the reference line for about four tenths of a second. The whole line is the target, not only the chevron, and a pointer crossing a column of references on its way somewhere else never rests long enough to open any of them. | Move away. It closes after a short grace period, which is what lets the pointer cross the small gap from the line to the panel. |
Touch | Tap the chevron. Hover is deliberately ignored on touch, so a tap does not open and immediately close the panel. | Tap outside. |
Keyboard | Tab to the chevron, then Enter or Space. It is a normal button and a separate stop from the name beside it, because they are two different actions. | Escape, which also puts focus back on the chevron. |
The chevron never hides until hovered. On a touch device it is the only way in, and a control that appears on hover is a control a tablet cannot find.
A panel opened by a pointer drifting over a reference does not move keyboard focus, and closing it does not move focus either. A panel opened deliberately by click, tap or keyboard does take focus, so it can be read and tabbed through. A screen reader announces the chevron as "Show details for" plus the record's name, and the revealed panel as the record's name followed by "details".
The revealed panel is about 288 pixels wide, narrowed further where there is less room, and opens on whichever side of the reference has more space. A linked record taller than the room available scrolls inside its own panel. The card itself still never scrolls.
#What is inside a linked record
Each attribute is shown as a label with its values beneath, joined by commas where there are several, at exactly the same sizes and colours as the rest of the card.
The rows are always stacked, label above value, even in the widest layout, because the box sits inside a field's value column and is narrow even when the panel is wide.
An attribute with no value is left out altogether, unlike the customer's own attributes, which show "None". A card that reported blanks about a record the reader did not ask about would be noise.
The values are plain text: not links, not lozenges, and with no pictures of their own, even where the same attribute would be a link on the customer's own card.
A field holding several linked records draws them as a vertical list, never as lozenges, with more space between items so two boxes do not read as one.
#When a linked record cannot be named
Where a link cannot be resolved, for example because the record was deleted between two lookups, the card prints a placeholder in italics: the word "Record" and the first eight characters of its identifier, with the tooltip "Attio has no title for this record." It never prints a bare identifier as though it were a name, and the rest of the card still renders around it.
A record with no name is never titled by its email address. The app works down a ladder of candidates for a name, and an address is deliberately not on it, so a nameless person shows as the object's own noun and a short identifier instead.
#A few things worth knowing
An attribute deleted from a linked object disappears from the card with no warning at all. The customer's own attributes get a warning triangle for administrators; a linked record's do not, and the place that gap is reported is the project's settings page rather than the issue.
Because empty attributes are dropped inside a linked record, a company with three of its eight chosen attributes filled in looks like a company with three attributes.
A domain or an email address that is a working link on the customer's own card is plain text inside a linked record. There is nothing to click, and that is the design rather than a fault.
#Related
One level deep, and it stops there on purpose.
