The References panel

What it is

The References panel is a project-level panel that lists every entity your currently open tabs depend on, recursively. It is not specific to accounts. It applies to any project.

Open tabs sit in the tab bar and hold the entities you are actively working on: a Portfolio, a Backtest, a Model, a Signal. Each of those entities usually rests on others it did not put in the tab bar. A Backtest holds a Model. A Model reads Signals. The References panel makes that hidden layer visible without turning every dependency into its own tab.

How it tracks dependencies

The panel reads from what is open, not from what you last clicked. Open a Portfolio tab and a Backtest tab, and the panel lists every Signal and Model those two depend on, plus any other Backtests inside that Portfolio. Open another tab and the panel updates to add that tab's dependencies. Close a tab and the panel updates to drop anything only that tab pulled in.

The list is recursive. It does not stop at the direct dependencies of an open tab. It follows the tree down to dependencies of dependencies, so a Portfolio at the top surfaces the Backtests under it, the Models those Backtests use, and the Signals those Models read, all in one panel.

Why it exists

The panel is the standard way to navigate from a high-level entity down to the lower-level entities it depends on without cluttering the tab bar. A Portfolio can rest on many Signals. Opening each one as a top-level tab buries the two or three tabs you actually work in under a stack you only wanted to glance at.

It matters most in the read-only project that Open in project produces from an account. There you want to inspect what the account trades, not edit it, and you want to reach the dependencies without filling the tab bar with entities you will look at once.

Using it from an account inspection

When you run Open in project from an account, the new project opens with read-only tabs for the snapshot's Portfolio, each Backtest inside it, and each Model those Backtests use. Signals are left out of the tab bar on purpose. A live account often depends on many of them, and they are most useful read in context rather than as a wall of tabs.

Those Signals are still reachable, and the References panel is where they surface. Open the panel and it lists every entity the read-only tabs depend on, recursively, the left-out Signals among them. Click one and it opens in a read-only tab, under the same lock as the rest of the snapshot inspection. You can inspect it. To edit it, you clone it, which produces an ordinary editable entity in your library and leaves the account's snapshot untouched.