Objects
Audience: Admins, Developers, Solution Architects
Purpose: Explains how Custom Objects are structured in Kizen, including default fields, workflow behavior, contact objects, and best practices for accessing object metadata via the API.
Overview
Custom Objects are how data is modeled in Kizen. Custom objects can optionally include workflow data.
The following default fields make up a custom object:
Name
Text
The name of the entity
Owner
Team Selector
A single-select of all team members in your business
Date Created
DateTime
Objects with Workflows
When a custom object has a workflow, this introduces the concept of a record “stage”. When an object has stage information, a board view becomes available in the UI to view your records on a Kanban board according to their current stage.
The following additional default fields are enabled on objects with a workflow:
Value
Money
Conditionally available, only if "Track Entity $ Value" is enabled for the object.
Stage
Stage
Required. Default value is the first stage in the pipeline for the object.
Estimated Close Date
DateTime
Actual Close Date
DateTime
Read-Only in the UI. The value is set automatically when the entity is moved to a closed/won stage.
Decimal
Conditionally available, if "Include % Chance to Close" is enabled for the object. Range from 0 to 1.
Decimal
Conditionally available, if "Include % Chance to Close" is enabled for the object. Range from 0 to 1.
Reasons Lost
Dropdown
Conditionally available, if the entity is in a "Lost" stage in the pipeline.
Contact Object
The contact object (sometimes referred to as the client object) is a special object that has default fields for storing personal information for individuals.
Contact object default fields:
First Name*
Text
Last Name*
Text
Email*
Must be unique across all contact records.
Titles
Dynamic Tag
Tags
Dynamic Tag
Birthday
Date
Email Status
Dropdown
Options are fixed and cannot be changed.
Timezone
Timezone
Special dropdown of fixed timezone options.
Full Name
Calculated Value
This value is calculated by concatenating the first and last name fields. Cannot be independently changed.
Date Created
DateTime
Immutable, and set automatically.
Retrieving Object Metadata
To fetch the metadata for a custom object, make a GET call to /api/custom-objects/{object_identifier}. This API endpoint will return owner and access data for the object, as well as metadata about fields, relationships, and pipeline stages if applicable:
Object Best Practices
Kizen uses globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) to identify all entities in the system (custom objects, fields, activities, clients, etc). Because these IDs are unique across the entire platform, they are not portable from business to business. If a configuration is exported and imported into another business, all the objects will be assigned new IDs.
When building integrations for Kizen using the API, it may be tempting to simply hard-code IDs into an application, such as the ID for an object, or the IDs of fields to be updated. However, this is brittle, not resilient to changes to the data model, and won’t work for applications or plugins meant to work with multiple businesses.
Instead of hard-coding IDs, consumers of the API should prefer to use metadata endpoints to look up IDs dynamically or by API name. See Retrieving Object Metadata for more information.
What's Next
In the next section, Object API Names, you’ll learn how objects, fields, activities, and automations are identified in API requests, how object API names are generated, and how to use object identifiers when interacting with Kizen programmatically.
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