How it works - The Hierarchical View

The Hierarchical View in Links Explorer is a feature designed to display the complete hierarchy of an item and its links with other items. It can span across various boards and workspaces, providing a unified and comprehensive perspective of your project's structure.

To understand how to effectively use this feature and leverage its full potential, let's delve into its core functionality in the following sections.

Getting Started

The Hierarchical View is designed to help you when you have multiple items connected to one another. You can connect other items to the items of a given board by creating a Connect Boards column in the board. (You can read more about this board type in this article in the monday.com Knowledge base).

The Hierarchical view

The Hierarchical view represents your items in a tree format. Here is a breakdown of its structure –

Hierarchical View of item Create Banking app MVP - Beta

The Root node: The hierarchical view starts at the current item. This is the root node of the tree. We can explore its connected items from here.
Types of nodes: There are two types of nodes in the tree. Item nodes and Link nodes
- Item node: Anitem-node is the representation of corresponding monday.com Item in the tree. You can configure it to show required information fields using the Item Fields dropdown menu. (This functionality is covered in detail in the Customize Item Nodes section).
- Link node: Link nodes exist as children to Item nodes. When a monday.com item is connected to other items via a connected board relation, this relation is represented as a child link-node and the relation value, i.e. the connected item is represented as its child node.
Expansion Toggler: You can control the visibility of a node’s children using the expansion toggler present just before the node.

Example Hierarchical View of an Item

Hierarchical View of item Create Banking app MVP - Beta

Let us understand the tree structure better using the example in the image above –

The view is opened on the item: Create Banking app MVP - Beta

The Root node: In the image above, observe how the root node of the tree is represented: it is the top-level item node, identified by sharing its name with the current item on which the view is opened. i.e. Create Banking app MVP - Beta
Types of nodes:
- Item node: In the image above, observe that each of the relevant monday.com items is represented as an Item node. For instance, the nodes: Create Banking app MVP - Beta, Login Methods, Ability to Link bank account are all item nodes, which correspond to the respective monday items of the same names.
- Link node: Here, let us consider one item related to the current item. Observe the snippet below taken from the default Main Table View. The current item Create Banking app MVP - Beta is connected to the item Login Methods via the board connection named Requires (along with two other items).
  - Now, observe below that in the hierarchical view, the node Create Banking app MVP - Beta has the child link-node Requires , which is the name of the corresponding column. The values of this column are shown as its children item nodes. Identify that the node Login Methods is present here as a child node to Requires. (along with the other connected values).
Expansion Toggler: Observe that in the image below, clicking the ▶️ icon of a node toggles the visibility of its children.