Faster Snippets: Navigation Properties and Field Names

Modified on Mon, 15 May 2023 at 04:16 PM

Navigating Object Relationships

In Clio, objects (such as Contacts and Matters) have relationships with each other.

When you are building snippets using Faster Snippets, these relationships are conveyed using the period ( . ) character. For example, if you see a tag such as:

{Matter.Client.Name}

This can be read as:

Find the selected Matter
For that Matter, find the related Client
For that Client, find its Name

Circular References

Sometimes, however, there may be circular references between different objects and that means that there may be multiple tags that extract the exact same data. For example:

{Matter.Description}

and

{Matter.Folder.Matter.Description}

Both will return the matter's description, however, the first option is much more efficient.

{Matter.Description} can be read as:

Find the selected Matter
For that Matter, find its Description

Whereas {Matter.Folder.Matter.Description} can be read as:

Find the selected Matter
For that Matter, find the root Folder that documents are stored in.
For that Folder, find the related Matter (That's the same matter as in Step #1!)
For that Matter, find its Description.

When you have choices between a direct path and an indirect path, you should always choose the most direct path to get to the data you want.