Relationships between items
It just occurred to me that for one financial organisation that I use, I have many 1Password items of different types related to that organisation:
- A Login item, containing all the login information for that organisation's web site/app
- One or more Bank Account items — e.g. a current account, a savings account — each containing account-specific information such as account type, account number etc
- One or more Credit Card items — e.g. a debit card, credit card, card in another name — each containing card-specific information such as expiry date, verification code etc
In a similar way, I have multiple Email Account items that correspond to mailboxes hosted by a single hosting provider which has its own Login.
And of course, most items including Logins, Driving Licences, Passports, Bank Accounts and Credit Cards may be connected to an Identity.
Would it be beneficial if there was some way to connect related items in 1Password, to show that they are related? This would also provide an easy way to navigate between them. Has this been considered, and is it a worthwhile enhancement?
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Hi, @semblance.
The idea of item relationships and linkage has come up before, e.g. where I made a brief comment a few months ago:
Or maybe those other item types could link to corresponding Login items with minimal details.
And @MikeT's reply there:
For now, if you need something that needs to be fillable via the 1Password extension, you have to create a Login for it. If you want to add more data, you can either add custom fields in the Login item or just use both the Login and Email items together. You could add a tag to connect them together, so that you can find them later.
You asked:
Would it be beneficial if there was some way to connect related items in 1Password, to show that they are related?
Sure, like with your example:
And of course, most items including Logins, Driving Licences, Passports, Bank Accounts and Credit Cards may be connected to an Identity.
"Linking" to an Identity item could often be preferable to redundantly duplicating desired fields from it to other items, especially when you want a change in the Identity item to be propagated to all items linked to it.
Got any examples of how you'd like to connect and use related items?
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Well, the best example is the one I first gave: for one financial services provider, I have one Login (that I use to access its website), two Bank Accounts (a current account and a savings account), and three Credit Cards (a debit card in my name, a credit card in my name, and a credit card in another name). These six items are all linked.
Similarly, I have (say) 3 Email Account items that correspond to mailboxes hosted by a single hosting provider. At the same time, for that hosting provider I have one Login, which I used to access their web site (as myself). The hosting provider's Login credentials are different from the 3 Email Account's SMTP credentials. But still, the four items are related.
How would I like to use related items? Well, I'd like to be able to create custom fields, whose name is (perhaps) a free-text field — e.g. "has Bank Account", in a Login — and whose value is a reference to another item, that I can select. And then, when viewing the item, I want to be able to click on the custom field value to navigate to that item.
It would be a bit of a pain manually making each relationship two-way though. Maybe 1Password could help along there, so that if I create a custom field "has Bank Account" in a Login, pointing to a Bank Account, then 1Password will automatically create a corresponding custom field in the Bank Account, called "has Login", pointing back to the Login :-)
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Easy way to link related items: assign them a common Tag. Works today on the Mac (main app, 1P/mini, and browser extensions), and hope springs eternal that tag support will find its way to other platforms.
I'm between homes at the moment, and have several different addresses. I've been looking for a good way to keep track of which address is being used with which credit card, bank account, etc. Writing this comment, I just realized that Tags are the answer!!
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Thanks for that detailed example, @semblance.
@benfdc's suggestion for using tags to link items (also mentioned in @MikeT's reply quoted earlier) is currently the preferred method. It's also less complex and confusing than something life inter-item field linking would be. And already possible. :)
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OK, I'm half sold on that idea — the nice thing about tags is that if you click on a tag (in the TAGS section of the LH navigation pane) then you see all the items that have that tag, which is the set of related items in this example.
However, if you navigate to the item by any other means (e.g. search, navigate by category, etc), then just having that item open only allows you to see that it has a particular tag. You can't easily see what other items share the same tag, or navigate to those items, which is kind of the point.
Perhaps it's a lost opportunity here that clicking on a tag in the "tags" attribute (at the bottom of an open item) currently does NOTHING. That's true for both single and double-click.
Wouldn't it be great if single-clicking a tag within the tags attribute of an item would open that tag in TAGS section the LH navigation — BUT persist the selected item, so the same item stays open in main RH pane? Then the middle pane would update to show all the other items with the same tag in an unselected state.
In other words, when you click any tag in the "tags" attribute of an open item, the RH pane would stay exactly the same, while the LH navigation pane would switch to show the chosen tag highlighted in the TAGS section, and the middle pane would update to show ALL the items that have that tag, but with the same one selected that is open in the RH pane (and that was selected before).
This would allow you to effortlessly view all other items that share the same tag, and if you want, navigate to them — and back again.
I think this would be one of those super-neat magical little touches that would delight users and speed up their workflow. It's also quite document-centric and hypertexty. Effectively, it's treating a tag as a link; it would only stop being a link while you Edit an item.
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Wow. I thought that clicking on an item’s tag in the main app already worked the way that @semblance suggests that it should—selecting that tag in the sidebar and displaying all items with that tag. I’m surprised to see that this is not so. My first reaction was that this must be a 1Password 4 bug, but I just fired up my trusty old copy of 1Password 3.5, and I see the same thing.
+1 for @semblance’s suggestion.
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Hi @semblance and @benfdc,
This is the second conversation I've seen about adding links to 1Password lately! I'll be sure to add your votes to the feature request, keep up the awesome suggestions :)
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Add my vote for links. I'd settle for one item being able to reference another item explicitly, rather than implicitly with a common tag. However, I'd love to have more complex behavior. In particular:
Prevent an item from being deleted if it is referenced by another item.
Display the transitive closure of items produced by following incoming and/or outgoing references. This is the current behavior with a common tag, since a tag effectively defines a fully connected subgraph of items.
Allow finer-grained links, like individual labels and individual label values. This would be useful when, for example, the same credentials are used for multiple items (say a login and an email account). Rather than repeating a password and having to remember to update it in all the correct places when it changes, only one label of one item would store the password, and all the other labels with the same password would simply point to the original. Updating one could update them all.
Some of this would help improve my workflows, but mostly it's about keeping my credentials consistent, reducing the overhead of curating several hundred items. I understand that references of any kind are a big design hairball, but I'd find them useful. Tags are a practical workaround, but they are not a substitute.
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@Megan and @sjk, in resurrecting this older thread (apologies if I missed a more recent one), I'd like to add my vote for creating item relationships. I own a web development company, and most of my clients have a card on file, numerous login items for multiple services (hosting/ftp, wp, social networks, etc.), not to mention individual cards for user-specific data for multiple members in my client's organization.
Have you guys looked into emulating the methodology used in syncing contact info on iOS and Android devices?
The way I see it most effectively added, if this were to materialize, would be to add a repeatable "link item" field for all item types, which would form a relationship between that and another item. Multiple items could be added using the repeating field, yet all would share the same relationship "ID". From a technical implementation standpoint (thinking in terms of a basic database system), having all relationships stored in a separate table with connected item IDs sharing a unique "rel ID" (representing an active relationship) would be a lightweight and viable implementation, IMHO.
As a simplistic example, if there are three cards all related to one client organization, I could reference each of the other two cards from any one card with the repeating field (just like we add custom fields currently). On the backend, the software generates a unique ID representing that new relationship, and assigns the item ID of all three items (the initiating item, and both referenced items) to that unique relationship ID.
From a usability standpoint, data wouldn't need to be merged and displayed together, nor would data need to change based on actions to related items; simply listing related items when viewing one that shares a relationship ID with one or more additional items would be sufficient. Though tags do effectively accomplish the same purpose (though in a somewhat hacky manner, IMO), I would love to see some type of relationship ability come in the near future. :)
(On a side note, you guys are doing a fantastic job, and outdid yourselves especially on the last update. Keep up the great work!)
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Thanks so much for your kind words and some interesting ideas for item links/relationships in 1Password. I'm happy to pass that all along to our team.
Keep your fantastic feedback coming! :)
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