Because of their nature in the business world, certain custom objects cannot exist independently and always require a parent. For example, in the insurance industry, claims can only be filed against existing policies.
You can establish a parent-child relationship in the following ways:
•Create an embedded custom object within a custom object. For details, see Embedded Custom Objects.
•Create two custom objects and specify one to use the other as a parent.
On the General tab of the child object definition, you select the parent object from a drop-down list and select a check box to confirm the object requires a parent. For details, see General Custom Object Information.
Results in End-User interface
Whenever you specify a parent custom object (for example, Policy for Claim) in a custom object definition, the relationship is represented in the following areas of the end-user interface:
•General block of child records—A field labeled Parent objectName is automatically created. With this field, the user can select the appropriate parent record. The record cannot be saved until a parent record is selected.
As soon as the user selects a parent record and saves the child record, the field displays the name of the selected parent record as a hyperlink, for example:
Parent Specialized Invoice: Correli Industries Specialized Invoice
•Parent record screens—A new block labeled with the plural form of the child custom object, for example, Line Items, is created, as shown in the following image. This block has a search field and provides quick access to the child records.
Example: Child Records Object in End-User Interface
This block is automatically added to the system view of the parent object. However, if you are planning to create your own custom view for the parent object, you have to add this block to the object view manually. For details on object views, see Object Views.
•All Services—When you define parent and child objects, you can check this box to hide them on the All Services drop-down list and the All Services page. If this box is checked, the object is also excluded from lists in the Global Search area.
If you choose to omit child objects from the Go to and Create a new drop-down lists, end users must go through the respective records of the parent object definition to create or access child custom object records.
Important: You must assign user group rights to both parent and child custom objects. Otherwise, users are not able to work with them.
Results in Designer User Interface
Whenever you specify a parent custom object (for example, Tort for Dispute), the following changes happen in the object definition screens in the Designer interface:
•Object Views tab—A system block named after the child object in the plural is automatically created and become available for adding to the custom object views of the parent object.
•Object Navigator window—The parent-> attribute appears in all of the child object definition's TProject tables, and you can use it to build attribute paths. For more details, see Using Object Navigator.
