Link Relationships - Precisely_EnterWorks - EnterWorks - 11.0

Linked records are records that have a relationship with another record. For example, a product record may contain links to accessory products or related products. The records can be in the same repository or in different repositories.

Records can be linked to digital asset metadata records. A digital asset is a file, such as an image, spreadsheet or PDF file. For every digital asset, EnterWorks's DAM keeps a metadata file in the DamMaster repository. If a record is linked to a digital asset metadata record, it is said to be linked to the digital asset.

Link relationships can be "one-to-one" (one record linked to another record), "one-to-many" (one record linked to more than one record), or "many-to-many" (records can both have more than one record link to them and can link to more than one record).

Repositories can also be linked and have link relationships. The path of these multiple link relationship between repositories is used to control publication, customized import, customized exports and can be used for other purposes as well.

In a link relationship, one repository is the parent and other repository is the child. The linkage between repositories is created by joining one or more attributes from both repositories. The join attributes must be defined as part of the snapshot table in order to participate in the join. Once a link has been established, the link is available to be displayed as a link table in both parent and child repositories.

A join attribute pair is used to identify the linked records. You need to have a dedicated attribute in your child repository that will be used to identify the parent record so that EnterWorks knows which child records have which parents. When a child record is created, its join attribute value will be set to the parent's join attribute value.

For example, lets say the parent repository has an attribute called "ProductID" and you create an attribute in the child repository called "ProductID". (The attributes do not have to have the same names, but if they do, it is easier to see at a glance what the join attributes are.) When a child record is linked to a parent record, the parent record's ProductID is copied into the child record's ProductID. Then EnterWorks can tell which child records are linked to which parent records.

There may be cases in which you want to define more than one join attribute pair, for example, if you are using a set of primary keys to uniquely identify the parent record.