Add Custom Attributes

Applies to: Catalog API

Learn how to add custom attributes to your catalog objects and delete a custom attribute object.

Custom attributes can be used to associate additional information with supported catalog objects. For example, a quick service restaurant hires an order-ahead manager. The order-ahead partner needs additional information for each menu item:

• A partner-specific menu item name, such as "Chicken" instead of the original item name of "CHK".
• A partner-specific price.
• Allergen information.

The seller can have a custom attribute added to a CatalogItem object in the restaurant catalog that exposes those additional details.

Currently, catalog objects of the following types can have custom attributes added to them:

• ITEM
• ITEM_VARIATION
• MODIFIER (2023-04-19 or later)
• MODIFIER_LIST (2024-04-17 or later)
• CATEGORY (2024-04-17 or later)

Seller-visible custom attributes appear within the Item Library and Service Library in the Square Dashboard, allowing sellers to leverage Square as a one-stop shop for managing their information.

• Each Square account can have up to 10 seller-visible and 10 seller-hidden custom attributes.
• You cannot edit the type of a custom attribute after creation.
• You cannot edit the configuration for STRING type attributes after creation.
• You must use Square Version “2020-03-25” or later to work with custom attributes.

Each application linked to a seller account can create up to 10 seller-visible custom attribute definitions defined by a CatalogCustomAttributeDefinition object. Custom attribute definitions appear in the Item Edit sheet in the Square Dashboard, where sellers can see and edit the custom attribute values.

Adding a custom attribute definition to an item, item variation, modifier, modifier list, or category makes the custom attribute appear on every object of that type within the seller catalog. For example, if a seller has a custom attribute to represent pizza toppings, every item in that seller's catalog (including sodas) has the toppings attribute.

You can control the visibility of a custom attribute by setting the CatalogCustomAttributeDefinition app_visibility and seller_visibility fields.

Note that the application that created a custom attribute definition always has the ability to retrieve, search, and update the values of any custom attribute that uses that definition.

The app_visibility field controls whether the custom attribute is readable or writable by other applications:

• APP_VISIBILITY_READ_ONLY - Visible and searchable by other applications.
• APP_VISIBILITY_READ_WRITE_VALUES - Other applications can read and write custom attribute values on objects.
• APP_VISIBILITY_HIDDEN - Other applications cannot see APP_VISIBILITY_HIDDEN custom attribute definitions or the associated values.

The seller_visibility field controls whether the custom attribute appears in the UI of Square products, such as the Square Point of Sale application or the Square Dashboard:

• SELLER_VISIBILITY_READ_WRITE_VALUES - Sellers can search and edit the custom attribute. For example, an application can define a custom attribute definition and set seller_visibility to SELLER_VISIBILITY_READ_WRITE_VALUES. This way, sellers are able to write values of the custom attribute and read them from the Square Dashboard. Sellers can also search for this custom attribute, which might be useful for storing data for which the seller is intended to be the source of truth.

• SELLER_VISIBILITY_HIDDEN - Sellers cannot see custom attribute definitions or the associated values.

A custom attribute can be of one of the following types:

A SELECTION type custom attribute has multiple possible values defined by the developer in the CatalogCustomAttributeDefinitionSelectionConfig object. SELECTION type attributes can also allow single or multiple value selections.

Limitations include the following:

• Each CatalogCustomAttributeDefinition object of the SELECTION type can define up to 100 allowed selection values.
• Each item or item variation can have up to 100 active selection values.

A STRING type custom attribute can take any free-form string value of up to 255 characters. The string value can include any Unicode code point. Empty strings are also allowed.

Each custom attribute with the NUMBER type can store values with up to 5 decimal places and can support values up to approximately 90 trillion (exact value 263/100,000).

A true or false value. For example, BOOLEAN type custom attributes can be used to set whether an item is available for delivery in a third-party delivery application.

To use custom attributes, you need to:

1. Call UpsertCatalogObject to create CatalogCustomAttributeDefinition object by specifying CUSTOM_ATTRIBUTE_DEFINITION as the CatalogObject type and assigning to the custom_attribute_definition_data object appropriate data including the type of custom attribute, allowed hosting object types, and the visibility.
2. Assign a value to the custom attribute on a specified hosting catalog item, item variation, or modifier.

In the following example, a custom attribute definition is created for a custom attribute to track what brand of cocoa is used for a Hot Cocoa item. This custom attribute takes STRING values. You specify a key that you can use to identify this custom attribute definition in the next step.

In the previous example, the custom_attribute_values field includes "custom_attribute_definition_id": "#cocoa_brand". When you're creating a batch-upsert request, be sure to include this field when you use the custom_attribute_values field.

To delete a custom attribute from the catalog, call the DeleteCatalogObject endpoint while supplying the custom attribute ID as the object_id path parameter value. In the following example, the custom attribute object ID is assumed to be VEER7NOZJRW75LXVVVS4BX25:

• Video: Catalog Custom Attributes