About Creating Relationship Definition

Creating relationship definitions allow you to define, for a relationship family, which entity families are related to one another through that relationship.

Each relationship definition consists of the following elements:

A relationship family.

Note: The relationship family stores relationship definitions. For example, the Has Maintenance relationship family might store a relationship definition that relates the Pump family to the Work Order family.
A predecessor entity family.
A successor entity family.
Cardinality, which specifies how many entities in the predecessor family can be linked to how many entities in the successor family.

While defining a relationship definition, make sure that they do not spread to subfamilies. In other words, you must create relationship definitions for each specific predecessor and successor family that you want to participate in the relationship. For example, if the Manufacturer family has two subfamilies, Chinese Manufacturer and Canadian Manufacturer, and you want to be able to link Chinese Manufacturer records and Canadian Manufacturer records to Equipment records, you must to create a relationship definition for both the Chinese Manufacturer family and the Canadian Manufacturer family. Defining a relationship for the Manufacturer family alone would not be sufficient.

After you create relationship definitions, you must make sure that you assign family-level privileges, such that the users have permission to access all the families involved in the relationship definition, including the relationship family. Granting permission to only some of the families in a relationship will grant a user only partial access to the records that are linked to one another through that relationship.

Note: You may want to avoid using inactive entity families in relationship definitions. Otherwise, when viewing a record in the Record Manager, and using the All Possible Families option, users will see ALL related families, including inactive families.