Why a field on the card is empty
An empty row on a customer card is not one problem. The card deliberately keeps a row it cannot fill, because a row that quietly disappeared would read as "this customer has no such field" when the truth may be that the field is empty, that the attribute has gone from Attio, or that this version of the app cannot read the type.
The states look different on purpose. This page is how to tell them apart from the issue view, without going to Attio first.
#The empty rows, side by side
What you see in the field | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
"None" under the label | Attio holds no value for this record on that attribute. | Nothing. The row is kept on purpose. |
Nothing at all under the label | The attribute's type is one this version of the app does not recognise. | Untick the attribute until a later version understands the type. |
A warning triangle beside the label | Attio no longer returns that attribute. Only project administrators see the triangle. | Pick a different attribute on the Fields tab. The old one carries a "Missing in Attio" badge there. |
"Workspace member" in italics | The value points at somebody in your Attio workspace. This version does not look their name up. | Nothing available today. |
"Attio" | The value points at Attio's own automation rather than at a person. | Nothing. It is accurate. |
"Record" and eight characters, in italics | A linked record the card could not resolve, or one with nothing to title it. | Nominate a title attribute for that linked object on the Matching step. |
#An attribute type this version does not recognise
The card knows seventeen Attio attribute types and it knows them by name. If Attio introduces another, an app built before that type existed has no way to read a value of it, and the choice it makes is to print nothing: the row appears with its label and an empty space beneath it. Raw data is never printed onto a customer's ticket, which is the only degradation worth having here.
The attribute is still listed in the Fields step, and the tell is the type note beside its name: where every familiar attribute reads Text, Currency, Linked record and so on, an unrecognised one is labelled with Attio's own name for the type. That unfamiliar word is the warning, and it is the only one you get. Ticking such an attribute produces a row that stays blank for every customer.
There is nothing to configure your way out of, so leave it unticked rather than leaving agents with a permanently blank row.
#An attribute that has gone from Attio
If Attio no longer returns an attribute the project is configured to show, the row is kept rather than dropped, and a small warning triangle appears beside the label. Its tooltip reads "Attio no longer returns this attribute. Choose a different one in project settings." Agents never see the triangle, because they cannot act on it.
In the Fields list the same attribute is shown with a red "Missing in Attio" badge and keeps its position in the order until somebody removes it by hand. Nothing is tidied up for you, deliberately: silently dropping it would throw the choice away the next time anything on that list was touched.
#Names the card could not resolve
Where a linked record cannot be resolved, because the lookup failed or because the record was deleted between two reads, the card prints a placeholder in italics reading "Record" and the first eight characters of the record's identifier, with a tooltip reading "Attio has no title for this record." It never prints a bare identifier as though it were a name.
Attio has no single title field, and a custom object may have no name at all, so links only read as well as the attribute they are pointed at. Each linked object can be given a title attribute on the Matching step, where the default is "Use the default title". One thing is never used for this: a record with no name is shown as its object's noun with a short identifier rather than as the person's email address.
#Inside a linked record, empty attributes are dropped
The customer's own empty attributes show "None". Attributes inside a linked record do not: one with no value is left out of the box altogether, because a card reporting blanks about a record the reader did not ask about is noise.
An attribute the project chose to show from a linked record that no longer exists in Attio also disappears from the card with no warning at all. The place an administrator is told about that is the settings page, not the issue.
A missing card is a different question This page is about one empty row. If there is no card on the issue at all, that is elsewhere: the card renders nothing whatever for a viewer outside the audience the project chose, and nothing for an agent on a project whose setup is unfinished. Only a project administrator is shown which piece of setup is missing, so "the panel is not there" is not on its own evidence of a fault.
#A few things worth knowing
The warning triangle on a deleted attribute is drawn for project administrators only, so nobody with the power to fix it is looking at the ticket where it shows. An agent saying "that field is always blank" is often the only signal an administrator gets.
"None" and a blank space mean opposite things. "None" is the card telling you Attio holds nothing there. A genuinely empty space under a label is the card telling you it could not read the value at all. An address whose parts are all empty counts as nothing and reads "None", not a line of commas.
A chosen attribute that has gone from Attio keeps its row on the card and its place in the order in settings until a person removes it. Nothing expires it, and the fifteen-minute value refresh will not clear it either.
#Related
Four kinds of empty, three of them deliberate.
