Relationships
Link the records of two objects, such as a company and its contacts, so each record shows the other and filters read through the link.
Who can do this: Owners and Admins, or a role with Organization settings, make and archive relationships.
A relationship links the records of two objects, such as a company and its contacts. Each linked record shows on the other's page, and filters and rollups read through the link.
Built-in relationships#
| Relationship | How many |
|---|---|
| A company's contacts | Many to many: a contact belongs to up to five companies, one of them its Primary company. A company marks its Primary contact. |
| A company's deals | One to many: a deal has one company. |
| A deal's contacts | Many to many, each contact with a role such as Primary or Champion. |
| A company's subsidiaries | One to many, from a parent company. |
| A company's projects, a deal's projects | One to many. |
Built-in relationships cannot be archived or deleted.
Link two objects#
No settings page makes a relationship. Ask the Agent, naming the two objects and how they relate:
Link each service visit to its customer, so a customer's page shows all its visits.
It proposes the relationship on a card to approve, unless your organization runs in Full autonomy. A relationship has:
- one to many, such as a customer and its visits, or many to many, such as projects and their suppliers;
- a label for each side, such as Visits on the company and Customer on the visit;
- roles, if a link needs to say what a record is to the other: up to 25 to a relationship, up to 5 on one link.
Developers make one with association.define through the API. A call from an API key also waits for a person to approve it.
On a record#
Every record shows its links under Related, one block per relationship, by its label. Link a record adds one, with suggestions such as records linked to a record this one is linked to, and View all opens the whole list. On a phone, Related is a tab of the record.
A Record reference property is the other way to point at a record: it holds one record of another object as a value, like any other property. See Properties.
Filters and rollups#
- In a list's filter, each relationship offers the linked records' properties, named as the relationship and the property, such as visits whose customer is in one city.
- A Rollup property counts or totals the records linked to this one, over one relationship: Count, Sum, Minimum, Maximum or Average. Money never totals across currencies. See Formulas.
Archive or delete a relationship#
Your relationships, in Settings > Data > Custom objects, lists the ones your organization made. Archiving one takes it off every record of both objects, and is refused while it still links records: unlink them first. Show archived relationships lists the archive, where you Restore one unchanged or delete it for good. A delete is refused while a rollup, report, metric, list or sharing rule reads through it.