Operating groups & saved views

A group is a named set of records you define — Summer range, Made in Leeds, Metals — and it carries no behaviour at all. A connected assistant can read your groups and, with write access, create them and move records in and out. Saved views are a different thing, and the assistant’s relationship with them is much narrower; that is at the bottom of this page.

What it takes

Reading groups needs nothing beyond a connection. Creating, renaming, deleting a group and changing its membership need write access — an API key created with read & write scope, or a web-chat connection granted read & write when it was linked. No plan gate: groups are available on every plan.

The three kinds of group

A group has a kind, and it never changes: a group of finished goods, of assembly bills, or of raw materials. A group of one kind can only ever hold records of that kind, so the assistant has to say which kind it means when it creates one. Names are unique within a kind, so the same name can exist once in each.

A record can be in any number of groups at once.

Reading groups

“Which groups do I have for raw materials, and how many materials are in each?”

The assistant lists groups with their member counts, optionally narrowed to one kind or to a name search. Listing gives counts, not members; to get the members it opens the one group, and gets back the ids of everything in it.

Creating and renaming a group

A new group is created empty, with a name and an optional description; members are added afterwards. A name another group of the same kind already uses — in any casing — is refused and the existing group is named, so the right move is to reuse that one rather than retry.

Renaming and re-describing work the same way. What a group holds cannot be changed: there is no converting a group of materials into a group of finished goods. Create the other kind and move the members.

Changing who is in a group

Three ways, and the difference matters:

Replace the membership with exactly the records you name. Anything you leave out is removed. Sending an empty list empties the group. Members that stay keep the date they joined.
Add records without disturbing the ones already there. Re-adding a current member does nothing, so this is the safe one to repeat.
Remove records. Also repeatable, and it works even for a record that has since been deleted — so a group can always be tidied up.

Deleting a group

Deleting a group removes the group and its membership rows. The records themselves are untouched — a group is a label, never an owner — and a delete is never blocked.

Saved views

A saved view is a list page’s setup: its columns, filters, search, sorting and page size. Views and groups get confused because both feel like “a way to see a subset”, so it is worth being exact about what an assistant can do with a view:

It can find one. Saved views are included in the app’s cross-entity search, so asking “do I have a view for discontinued items?” works.
It cannot create, edit, apply or delete one. Views are made and switched in the app’s own tab strip.
It cannot read a view’s contents as a query and run it for you. If you want an assistant to work over the same set, describe the filter to it, or put the records in a group — a group is the durable, addressable version of “this set of things”.