The card says the Attio connection needs attention
When Attio rejects the stored key, the card stops showing customer data and reads "The Attio connection for this project needs attention." A project administrator also gets an "Open project settings" link. Everybody else gets the sentence on its own and nothing to act on, which is deliberate: reconnecting is an administrator's job.
The sentence names no cause. It covers a key that was revoked, a key that now belongs elsewhere, and a key that has lost a permission it needs, and the card does not distinguish between them.
#What to do first
Open the project's settings, Apps, Attio, and go to the Connection tab.
Create a fresh key in Attio, paste it in, and press "Test and save this key". Pressing Enter in the field does the same thing, and Cancel empties the box without changing anything.
Read the result. "The key works but is missing permissions" means the key itself is sound and only the permissions on it want editing.
Testing and saving are one action. The key is tested against Attio first and stored only if Attio accepts it, so a bad paste never replaces a connection that was working, and the workspace name and slug recorded on the project are updated to whichever workspace the new key belongs to.
The connection is never tested on its own. Opening the settings page proves nothing about the key. The test only runs when an administrator runs it, which is why a connection that has stopped working announces itself on the card rather than on the settings screen. Equally, a healthy-looking settings page is not evidence that the key still works.
#While a key is half typed, the other tabs are held
As soon as there is text in the key box, the save bar for the other settings tabs disappears and the Connection tab explains why: "Changes on the other tabs are held until this key is tested and saved, or until you clear the field." That is what stops an untested key being stored as a side effect of saving something else.
#A bad key never takes the settings page down
Reading objects or attributes from Attio fails inside the screen rather than replacing it, so a revoked key never puts an error over the very page you need in order to fix it. The affected list shows a message with the reason underneath instead:
Where you are | What you see |
|---|---|
The record type step | "The objects could not be listed" |
The attribute picker in the wizard | "The attributes could not be listed" |
The Matching tab | "Attio could not be read" |
The value column on the Fields step | "The values could not be looked up" |
#Error wording never comes from Attio
The app writes its own sentence for every failure and never passes Attio's response text through to a screen. There is a specific reason for that: a validation error from a CRM is entitled to quote the value that failed validation, and on the lookup that matters most that value is the reporter's email address.
#A few things worth knowing
The sentence on the card is fixed wording and names no cause at all. The Connection tab is the only place to find out what Attio actually refused.
If the stored key cannot be read back for some reason, a connected project is treated as having no key: the settings page offers to connect a project that is in fact connected. Testing a key again is the way through it.
An agent seeing this sentence has nothing they can do, and no retry. Retrying is offered only on the error and rate-limited states, because those are the two where it helps.
#Related
The card reports it. The Connection tab explains it.
