Attributes

An attribute is a structured field on a patent or a product, one labelled slot with a known type. A patent has a title, applicants and dates; a product has websites, categories and manufacturers. Each of those is an attribute.

Think of an attribute as the light, sortable metadata on a record, rather than its deep content. A patent's claims or a product's feature tree are the substance you read one record at a time. Attributes are what you want to know at a glance, and they are uniform enough to scan, filter and chart across a whole set of records at once. That breadth is the whole point: attributes are how you reason over many patents or products together.

Every attribute belongs to a single research database, and patents and products keep separate sets. There are two kinds, and the difference is simply who creates them.

• System attributes are built in. Patalyze defines them and fills them in for you from the source data.
• Custom attributes are ones you add yourself, to capture what an analysis produces but the source never holds: a reviewer, a priority, a deadline.

Wherever an attribute lives, it appears in two views. On a table it is a column, so you can scan, sort and filter a set of records side by side. On a single patent or product page it is a row in the attribute panel, alongside that record's other details. Same field, two ways to look at it.

System attributes#

System attributes come with every research database, and Patalyze keeps them filled in. As it reads a product from its description, files and crawl, it populates the built-in set: websites, categories, manufacturers, distributors and territories.

Patents carry their own built-in fields the same way, read straight from the patent record: title, applicants, inventors, dates, status and classifications.

You can edit a system attribute's value inline, but you cannot delete one or change its type. The rest of Patalyze relies on these fields being present and shaped the way they are. For the full set each record type carries, see patents and products. Everything below is about the other kind: the custom attributes you define.

Value types#

Every custom attribute has a type, and the type decides what its values look like and how they behave when you sort, filter or chart on them. Nine are available.

Most types need nothing beyond a name. A few carry a little extra configuration:

• Currency takes a currency code (EUR by default) so amounts format correctly.
• Select and multi-select each carry a list of options that you label and color.
• User and users draw their choices from the people in your organization.

The type is the one thing you fix when you create an attribute. Everything else (its name, its description, its options) can change later.

Creating an attribute#

You add a custom attribute from a table, and it lands there as a new column.

Click "Create attribute" and it appears as a new column on the table, empty and ready to fill in.

Editing and deleting#

A custom attribute's header menu holds the rest of its lifecycle. "Edit attribute" reopens the same form to rename it, change its description, or add, rename, recolor and remove options. The type stays locked: changing it would strand the values already stored against the attribute.

There are two ways to make a column go away, and they are not the same thing.

• Don't show on page hides the column from one table without touching its data. You can add it back later from the column menu.
• Delete attribute removes the attribute itself, across the whole research database.

Setting values#

A value is whatever you record for one attribute on one record. You set it in either of two places, and the editors are identical in both.

In a table cell#

Click a cell to edit it in place. Text opens for typing, a number takes a figure, a checkbox toggles, and a date opens a calendar. A select or multi-select opens its options: pick one for a select, or toggle as many as you like for a multi-select. The user and users types work the same way over the people in your organization.

Clearing a cell empties it, and empty cells are simply skipped when you filter, sort or chart.

In the attribute panel#

Open a single patent or product and the same attributes line up in its attribute panel, with the same editors. It is the comfortable place to fill in several at once while you read a record, instead of reaching across a wide table.

Filtering and sorting#

Here is the payoff. Once a value is set, a custom attribute filters and sorts like any built-in column, and the operators follow its type:

• Text offers contains, is, starts with, and their negations.
• Number, currency and date offer the comparisons plus a between range.
• Select and user filter by is and is any of; multi-select and users by include and exclude.

Add a filter from the toolbar, or open the attribute's header menu and choose "Filter by" it directly.

Sorting lives in the same header menu, with "Sort ascending", "Sort descending" and "Clear sorting". Each type sorts the sensible way: numbers and dates by value, text alphabetically, and the option and checkbox types grouping like values together.

Visualizing attributes#

Any attribute can become a chart without leaving the table. Open its header menu, choose "Visualize as chart", and a preview appears, binned to suit the type: a select or numeric attribute as a ranked bar of its values, a checkbox as a donut split, a date as a trend over time. The preview respects the table's filters, so it charts exactly the rows you are looking at.

From the preview, "Add to dashboard" keeps the chart on an existing dashboard, or "Create dashboard" starts a new one. Click a bar to push that value back onto the table as a filter: the same attribute, now driving what you see.