Creating relationship

Overview

A relationship is a link between two forms in Zoho Creator, within the same application or different applications. When you create a relationship, you tell Zoho Creator to link a record in one form to one or more records in another form. Assume that you are creating an Employee Management application, to manage the employee details in your organization. You create a form called Employee to enter employee details like Name, DOB, Email, Qualification, Department etc. When you enter the details, you find that one or more employees belong to the same department and you have to enter the department name, again and again. This leads to wastage of time and duplication of values. Moreover, you also need to maintain other information related to each department, like department head, contact ID etc. To manage data efficiently and avoid duplication of values, we will create another table called Department to hold information of all the departments in the organization and create a relationship between the Department and Employee forms. To create the relationship, you just add a lookup field in the Employee form to import data from the field Department name in the Department form.

After you have created a relationship, you can use fields from the related form just as you would use any fields in the current form to display data in a view, in a script, and so on. You can also make changes to data in only one place, which eliminates data duplication and promotes data accuracy.

Creating a relationship using single-select lookup field

Let us take the example of the Employee Management application described above, with the Department and Employee forms. Typically an employee will be assigned to only one department and hence a relationship between the Employee and Department form is created using single-select lookup field. To do this,

1. Add a Lookup field in the Employee form

• Specify a label name, for example, "Department"
• Import data from Employee Manager - Department - Department Name where, Employee Manager is the application name, Department is the form name, Department Name is the field whose data is imported.
• Display as Dropdown/Radio-button (Single select)
• Click Done to update the changes
  

2. In the Employee form, the Department lookup field will display the name of all the departments from the Department Form.

Creating relationship with multi-select lookup field

Continuing with the Employee Management application, assume you have a form called Roles that stores the different type of employee roles. Typically an employee can be assigned to one or more roles and hence a relationship between the Employee form and Role form is created using multi-select lookup field. To do this,

1. Add a Lookup field in the Employee form

• Specify a label name, for example, "Roles"
• Import data from Employee Manager - Roles - Role Name where , Employee Manager is the application name, Roles is the form name, Role Name is the field whose data is imported.
• Display as a multi-selectlookup.
• Click Done to update the changes.

2. In the Employee form, the Role lookup field will display the name of all the Roles from the Role Form. You can relate one or more roles to each employee by selecting the required options.

Creating relationship from existing relations

You can create a relationship from existing relations. For example, in the section Creating a relationship using single-select lookup, we added Department as a lookup to the Employee Form and created a Employee -> Department relationship. Now, you can add the same relationship to the Department form and make it a bi-directional relationship. This will enable you to track the related items from both the Employee and Department form. To create a relationship from existing relations,

1. Add a lookup to the Department Form. In the Select Form drop-down, the existing relationships will be listed under the head Existing Relations, as shown in the screen-shot below. For example, select Form as Employee - Department, select the required lookup field and the display type and click on Done to add the lookup field.
   
2. In the Department view, the Employees belonging to a department will be listed, as shown below. You can now manage the Employees belonging to a department from both the Employee form and Department form.

Creating combined views from related forms

You can create combined views that display the required fields from one or more related forms. For example, we created three forms - Employee form, Department form and Roles form and created relationship across these forms using Lookup fields. Refer Combined Views, for more information.