I was struggling a few minutes ago. It was a struggle on many fronts. I knew there was a way to display the reference icon next to a read-only reference field, but I could not remember the specific way to set this up. I knew it was a dictionary attribute, but there are so. many. possibilities.
Following my normal process of searching Product Docs first, I searched for “dictionary attribute”. You’ll never guess that the result I wanted was not the first result, let alone on the first page of results.
No, I had to navigate elsewhere in Product Docs before finding a link to the Dictionary Attributes page.
One might guess that I should have started by searching for “dictionary attributes” instead despite “attribute” merely being the singular form of “attributes”. However, that would still not display the desired page in the search results (not the first result, not on the first page of results).
AI search was no more useful here. I added a question mark to the end of my query and the following appeared.
The text is not useful, but the third link was. Looks like my job is safe for a bit longer.
Adding a question mark to the end of “dictionary attributes” presented slightly more useful results, but still goes off on a tangent. Note the link I thought I wanted was the first link under “Learn More”.
Ultimately, I needed to get to the information on the Reference field icon page and not the Dictionary Attributes page at all! Specifically, the attribute on showing the reference icon on a read-only field. (That result happened to be on page 16 of the search for “dictionary attributes”.)
For some remarkable reason, this dictionary attribute is not documented on the Dictionary Attributes page. I’m glad it’s documented somewhere, but good luck finding it.
tl;dr
Reference icons on read-only reference fields are globally controlled by the system property “glide.ui.reference.readonly.clickthrough”. If set to “true”, the icon appears on read-only fields. If set to “false”, no icon appears. But…
To add a reference icon to a read-only reference field, add the attribute “readonly_clickthrough=true” to the Attributes field on the fields dictionary record.