Relation fields

Relation fields

• Value to display
  Which field from the related table will be shown on the screen when a record is chosen. Typically the ‘main’ or identifying field e.g. when a company is chosen for contact, you may want to display company name.
  
  
• Secondary value
  If there’s more than one identifying field, a second can also be chosen. e.g. a product may be identified by stock code primarily and then product name (or vice versa). If there are more than two, you can create a view (see below) and use a calculation in the view as the secondary value, which will allow any number of fields to be concatenated together.
  
  
• View to use
  This is the key option for relation fields, you should always specify a view. The idea is to create a view from the related table which includes any fields you will want to search on when adding a value. It can also contain filters to narrow down the list of possible options to those that make sense for a particular purpose. This view will pop up when you select ‘choose’ for a relation. As well as being useful to the user, the system will use this view in various places.
  
  
• One to one only
  Normally relations will be ‘one to many’, e.g. when relating a contact to an organisation, the org. may have many contacts, but each contact will be linked to only one org. Ticking ‘one to one only’ means that there’s only one related record allowed for any particular record. The practical upshot is that you can separate information into logical ‘blocks’ displayed as tabs. For example a company may have a ‘financial information’ tab that shows turnover, profit etc. A one to one link between a ‘financial info’ table and a ‘company’ table allows this information to be displayed in a tab, rather than all the fields going into the same company table, which could result in information overload for the user.
  
  
• Do not use session record for new items
  This normally ticked by default. If unticked, the system will automatically fill the relation when a new record is created, with the last related record the user was looking at. e.g. if the user recently looked at Company X, when adding a contact, the company relation will be set to Company X.
  
  
• On parent delete
  Controls whether a user is allowed to delete information that has ‘child’ data associated. See ‘deletion policies’ for a full explanation.