Attributes

What are attributes?

Alloy is a tool for describing the world around us. The assets and tasks within your organisation can be represented in Alloy as designs (or interfaces) containing attributes.

An attribute is a data field that represents a single characteristic of the concept described by a design/interface.

Attributes can represent physical characteristics (e.g. dimensions, components, location, condition) as well as abstract ones (e.g. unit number, installed date, owner). Link attributes are a special type that can reference items of a particular design/interface (e.g. a Teams item can link to multiple Team Members items).

Using the variety of attribute types available, almost anything can be represented as design/interface in Alloy!

Populating attributes with values

When creating an item from a design, or editing an existing item, you can populate the item's attributes with values.

If an attribute is configured with a default value, it will populate automatically but can be changed.

Attributes marked with an asterisk * are required, so they must contain a value when the item is saved. They can't be left blank!

Note

An attribute's Required property can be changed at any time. Therefore, you may encounter items with empty required attributes, which were saved before those attributes were made required. If those items need to be updated, you can use bulk actions to edit them all at once.

Adding attributes

You can add new attributes to any design/interface in Alloy, providing that you have an admin user account. To learn how, see Adding custom attributes.

Note

If a design implements one or more interfaces, it will inherit their attributes as if they were its own.

Editing attributes

You can edit and remove attributes from a design/interface, providing that:

• the design/interface isn't blueprinted to prevent editing

• no items exist where that attribute is populated with a value

To learn more, see Editing custom attributes.

Attribute types

Icon	Type	Description	Input Method
	AQS	Store an AQS query in JSON format	Build a query in the AQS Builder
	Date	Store a date value, e.g. 30 April 2024	Select a value with the calendar picker
	Date Time	Store a date and time value, e.g. 2 July 2025 13:30:00	Select a value with the calendar picker
	Geometry	Store geometry coordinates in GeoJSON format	Draw points, lines or polygons using the Geometry Editor
	JSON	Store JSON code	Type into a fullscreen JSON Editor
	Link	Store the ID of one or more items of a specific design/interface	Select one or more items with the item picker
	Number	Store a number value, e.g. 256, 3.1415	Type directly into the field
	Seasonal	Store a date without a year, e.g. 25th December	Select a value with the calendar picker
	Text	Store a text value, e.g. My friends and I love Alloy and use it every day	Type directly into the field
	Time	Store a time value e.g. 14:20:55	Select a value with the calendar picker
	Yes/No	Store a boolean value, e.g. true or false	Toggle the field to enable/disable it