Change display properties on Custom Objects

Status: Idea Submitted

Hello! Custom Objects don’t have a way to change the display properties after the Object is created. When making Custom Objects for other departments, nobody is fully certain about what we want the custom object to look like until it is made. These objects by their nature are fluid and subject to change as needs and capabilities change. There is a fix, but deleting the custom object and recreating it is not a good solution. Being able to do this will allow further customization of Custom Objects and will let us have exactly what we want.

I agree, but we’d also like to be able to set the field types of the two display properties to something other than text property -- such as Dropdown Select

That would be nice! I could totally see some use cases for this.

I’m hoping that this one is an easy fix. As @KHartleyDev mentioned, these things are often very different once data starts getting added & people begin working with the records. It would be nice to be able to update these after the fact.
And to @VEspo’s point, I’d love to be able to have non-text fields as well.

Another great suggestion. Having to delete and re-create object is a lack of efficiency

Hi,
I’m a Super Admin for a massive corporation that utilizes HubSpot, kind of surprised this one hasn’t been figured out yet. Custom objects at the minimum should have the ability to be customized after the fact. Very inefficient for CRM and Data teams to have to replicate and provision all new object data to change a title.
Can we get this changed soon HubSpot? This would be a big unlock for Data Ops teams.

I raised this issue on a separate ticket, which ARGonzales linked to this one - thank you.

You definitely do NOT need to delete and recreate the object to make changes to the primary/secondary display properties (or required, or searchable fields). The API provides a patch method to do just this. The constraint though is that this applies to custom properties only. You cannot use this method to change a standard object for these properties. If you’re on a custom object, I’ll happily walk you through the steps to achieve this with free/simple api calls - there are also paid for plugins which can do the same.

Following to see if this thread awakens the HubSpot gods. I suspect it won’t because there are many more basic capabilities missing, many of which are many years old now - which the developers continually choose to ignore.

This is definitely needed, especially because it doesn’t even seem clear when you first create the object that you won’t be able to change these later, so I suspect many people creating custom objects for the first time don’t realize they’re locking something in that is difficult to change later. I also big second the desire to allow the display properties, both primary and secondary, to be something other than text or number. I have use cases so far where I’ve wanted to use drop-downs and date/time pickers as part of the main display properties, and it’s inconvenitent to make users input an arbitrary text name for something that could be better described with another field that they are going to have to fill in anyways.