Update 14-12-2023:
These have been available for a while as columns that can be added in a view, and they will show a clickable record name if there’s 1 association, or “X <objectnames>” if there’s more than 1, and you can click to get a list of the records. For this specific use case, this was a fix, but there are still a couple of drawbacks:
- You can only ‘see’ them as a column. You cannot sort by this column, or filter on it in any lists or filters across HubSpot. I.e. while I can see which of my currently filtered records have an associated record of whatever type by adding it as a column, I cannot, say, filter down my records to only those where ‘associated X’ is known, or is Y, or etc.
- It’s only limited to the primary display property (i.e. name) of the associated record. What would be fully ideal is the introduction of lookup properties that let you create a property on record A, that shows the value of a specific property on associated record B. This is already an idea listed elsewhere with way more upvotes, so please go upvote that
Scenario
So I run into this all the time when trying to implement custom objects for our clients. Don’t get me wrong, CO’s are great and offer a lot of functionality under the hood, but they’re still quite lacking to make them useful for front office reps like Sales or Customer service.
One of these missing features is having associated records available as a property on a custom object record. The specific use case where this came up is a dealer in used and new trucks. They have a CO to house all their truck stock and pipeline, and one key bit of information for them to have to see in a tabular view, is what company a truck has been sold to. I.e., the name of the company record that’s associated with the truck record.
You’d think this is readily available since there is an association between the two objects, but no dice. Unlike with Contacts, Companies and Deals, that have ‘Associated XXX’ read-only fields on them that simply list out the name of the associated record(s), that’s not the case for custom objects.
There’s no way to use a workflow to populate a custom property on the CO record with the associated record’s name either, since a new association can’t be used as a trigger (there’s another great idea really).
Video
I’ve given this some background in a video.
Proposed solution
To me, a great solution would be the automatic creation of a read-only ‘Associated X’ property for every association that’s created on a custom object.