Activity Auto-association Rules API
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
What it is
The rules that decide whether an activity logged on one record — a call on a contact, say — also logs on associated records like that contact's primary company can now be read and updated through a public API, instead of only in Settings.
Why it matters
The settings existed but were buried and could not be managed programmatically. API access means the behaviour can be read, set and kept consistent across accounts rather than rediscovered by hand in each portal.
The Take
The options are appalling. It's like mostly most recently created, five most recently created, or most recently updated, five most recently updated for a lot of those relationships.
Good that it exists, and worth being careful with. The settings page behind these rules has always been hard to find and easy to misread, so being able to read the current configuration through an API is a genuine improvement — you can finally see what a portal is actually doing before you change it.
The honest problem is that the options themselves are thin. Most recently created, five most recently created, most recently updated, five most recently updated. Those are technical descriptions of a race condition, not descriptions of a business. Which record was touched most recently has nothing to do with which record the activity semantically belongs to.
Take the case that comes up constantly: should a call logged on a contact associate to the deals that contact is on? The first gate is whether the deal is open or closed. The second is what the association label says — a partner, a vendor finance contact, a third-party referrer all need to be on the record without every past deal they touched collecting every new email. None of that is expressible with the controls available, so the rules end up describing constraints instead of intent.
The upside of an API is not really automation here, it is help. Once this surface is reachable, Breeze and the other assistants can reason about it with you, which is a better path than trial and error through a hidden settings page. Treat this one cautiously in production — the downstream effects of a wrong rule are wide and quiet.
Watch Us Discuss This
The full segment from the show, us working through this update start to finish.
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