Signals Notebook: Variable Property in ADTs - Supported behavior and limitations

Description

Users attempted to configure an ADT Variation Table to display multiple material attributes via Variable Property. As of now this feature only retrieves the Name of the referenced entity and does not support exposing additional Material Table properties or multi-value outputs per row. 

Solution

• Variable Property behavior: 

  1. Variable Property is currently limited to retrieving only the Name attribute of the referenced entity. This is the expected behavior and is by design.

  2. Displays only the Name attribute of the entity referenced by the selected Internal Reference column.

  3. Does not store data; it dynamically reads from the referenced object

• Variable Property Limitations:

  1. The Variable Property feature does not support to automatically populate additional Material Table properties for multiple referenced reagents within the same row.The main reason is that this information is already captured within the experiment, so showing the same data again in additional columns would create duplicate information, which is generally not considered a best practice.In addition, handling multiple referenced items in a single row becomes technically complex. 

  2. For example:

     1. A single reagent value such as 104.2 can be stored as a numeric value.

     2. Multiple reagent values such as 104.2 and 45.6 would need to be stored as text (e.g., “104.2; 45.6”).

• Alternatives and guidance:
  • For multiple references in one cell, use a multi-value Internal Reference property; note that Variable Property will still only display Name and cannot expand to multiple columns.
  • Use Contextual Picklists or Data Sources where appropriate, understanding they may require individual selections or are not suited to multi-reference per-row displays.