Why the card has no Refresh button
This is the question that arrives in the first week. An agent watches a colleague correct a value in Attio, goes back to the ticket, and the old value is still on the card. There is no Refresh control to press, and there is not meant to be one.
The plain version of the limit: an edit made in Attio can take up to fifteen minutes to reach a card that somebody has already looked at. The window is deliberate. An uncached card would spend a request quota that is shared across every site running the app, so the card is built to be read many times and fetched rarely.
#What the card holds on to, and for how long
What is held | How long | What that means on the issue |
|---|---|---|
A matched record and the rows built from it | Fifteen minutes, shared by everyone looking at that customer in that project | An edit made in Attio can take that long to appear, on every issue for that customer. In exchange, a second agent's view costs no call to Attio or Jira at all. |
A confirmed no match, and a candidate list | Fifteen minutes | A customer newly added to Attio can take up to fifteen minutes to appear on an issue that has already been viewed. |
An object's list of attributes | One hour, per project | Renaming an attribute in Attio, or adding one, can take up to an hour to change a label on the card. |
Whether a viewer may see the card, and their Jira group membership | Fifteen minutes | Moving somebody into a group the card is restricted to can take fifteen minutes to let them in, and removing access can take fifteen minutes to shut them out. |
A record's picture | One hour, in that reader's own browser | Re-opening the same customer's ticket costs nothing. |
A failure, a rate limit, or a permission Jira would not confirm | Not held at all | One bad minute upstream never becomes fifteen minutes of an empty card. |
Because the answer is held on the app's side and shared by everybody looking at that customer in that project, reloading the issue does not shorten the window.
#Where "Try again" does appear
Exactly two states carry a retry, and they are the two where retrying is the next useful thing to do: a rate limit with nothing on screen, and an error. There is no general refresh control anywhere on a card that is showing rows.
A rate limit that arrives while values are already on screen is deliberately not one of them. The values stay, a quiet line is added under them saying they may be out of date, and no button is offered, because the reader already has something to read and a retry would only spend the budget again.
#What does not wait
A settings change clears the window at once. Changing the record type, the matching attribute, what a reporter is matched on, the fields on the card, a linked record's title, the attributes nested under a link, inline against hover, the picture settings or either domain list all take effect on the next view rather than fifteen minutes later.
Reassigning the reporter on an issue is noticed. If the reporter changes while the app still holds a recent answer, the app reads the new reporter's address rather than reusing the previous customer.
The preview an administrator sees while choosing fields is never cached, so somebody watching a change take effect sees the configuration they just saved.
#What the card will not do on its own
It does not reload when an agent switches back to the browser window.
It does not silently retry a failed lookup. A failure is answered with a sentence and, where retrying would help, a control.
It does not say how old its values are. The "updated N minutes ago" line was taken off the footer, along with the name of the Attio workspace, which leaves "Open in Attio" as the only thing down there.
Nothing is copied out of Attio on a schedule either. There is no background job and no timer: every value is fetched when somebody opens a request, and then kept warm.
#A few things worth knowing
Fifteen minutes is per customer per project, not per agent. If a colleague opened a ticket for the same customer fourteen minutes ago, your view inherits their answer and the clock is nearly up rather than starting now.
The card cannot tell you how stale it is, so there is no way to judge from the issue whether a value is a minute old or fourteen. If it matters, open the record in Attio.
Renaming an attribute in Attio is the slow one. The label can trail the rename by up to an hour, which is four times the window that applies to the values underneath it.
#Related
Fetched rarely, read often. That is the trade.
