Skip to main content
While objects store facts about your customers, activities store things that happen involving them: a phone call, a site visit, a webinar attendance. Each of these events occurs at a specific point in time and involves one or more of your records. For example, an outbound renewal call with Acme on the 14th of August is a single event. In Attio, it would be stored as one activity record, linked to the Acme company record and to the person records of everyone on the call.

​
Activities and activity records

Activities follow the same mental model as objects:
  • An activity is a data type, just like an object. It defines what kind of event you are logging (e.g. “Phone calls” or “Site visits”) and which attributes each event carries. In relational database terms, an activity is roughly a table.
  • An activity record is a single instance of an activity, just like a record is a single instance of an object (e.g. one specific phone call). In relational database terms, an activity record is roughly a row in a table.
Attio provides one system activity, phone calls, and you can create your own custom activities.

​
Attributes

Activities carry attributes, exactly like objects and lists do. Every activity starts with a set of attributes supplied by its schema (see below), and you can add your own custom attributes on top, e.g. a “Location” attribute on a “Site visits” activity.

​
Schemas

Every activity extends a schema. A schema is a common set of attributes that multiple different activities can use. Schemas ensure that similar kinds of events are structured in the same way: every interaction has a direction and participants, every call has an outcome, and so on. Schemas build on each other in a hierarchy: A schema further down the hierarchy includes all of the attributes of the schemas above it. For example, an activity built on the calls schema also has all of the interactions and activities attributes.

​
The activities schema

The activities schema is the root of the hierarchy. It supplies the attributes that every activity needs: Since every activity extends activities, every activity record also shows up on the activity timeline of each record it’s linked to via linked_records.

​
The interactions schema

The interactions schema extends activities and models events where people communicate with each other. It adds: Interaction records (and anything built on interactions, including calls and emails) also feed Attio’s Communications Intelligence features.

​
The calls schema

The calls schema extends interactions and models synchronous conversations. It adds:

​
The emails schema

The emails schema extends interactions and models sent or received email messages. It adds:
In addition to the attributes above, every activity has the system attributes created_at and created_by. They are set automatically and cannot be written to. Note that created_at (when the activity record was logged in Attio) is distinct from timestamp (when the event actually happened).

​
Extending a schema

When you create an activity, you choose exactly one schema for it to extend: activities, interactions, calls or emails. Choose the schema that most specifically describes your kind of event:
  • A “Site visits” activity extends activities: a visit happens at a point in time and involves records, but it isn’t a conversation.
  • A “Support chats” activity extends interactions: it has a direction and participants, but no call-specific or email-specific fields.
  • A “Demo calls” activity extends calls: it uses the full set of call attributes, including caller and outcome.
  • A “Marketing emails” activity extends emails: it uses the sender attribute on top of the direction and participants every interaction has.
The activity receives all attributes of the chosen schema, including those the schema inherits from its own parents. These inherited attributes appear on the activity like any other attribute, but they are managed by the schema: you cannot modify them or add select options to them. Custom attributes you create on the activity itself remain fully editable. The choice of schema is permanent. An activity cannot switch to a different schema after creation, so if you are unsure, prefer the more general schema and add custom attributes for the rest.

​
System activities

Attio defines some activities itself. These are called system activities and are marked with is_system_activity: true in the API. The first system activity is phone_calls, which extends the calls schema without adding any further attributes. You cannot modify system activities, but you can read and create their activity records over the API. If you’re building an integration, create your own custom activity rather than writing to a system activity. Prefix its slug with your app’s name, e.g. {app_name}_site_visits, to avoid conflicts with other apps and with future system activities.

​
How activities differ from objects

Activities intentionally stay close to the object model, so most of what you know about records applies to activity records too. The differences:

Working with activities over the REST API

Create activities, log activity records and link them to your data by domain, email address or phone number.