TIMSS 6: Relationships

TIMSS 6 has different a relationships scheme than TIMSS 5. In 5, you had a single relationship between 2 customers where one was the parent and one was the child. In TIMSS 6 you still have a relationship between 2 customers where one is the "parent" and one is the "child", but you will also have a new reciprocal relationship where the child becomes the "parent" and the parent becomes the "child".

What's the advantage you ask? Well it lets you define the relationship better and easier. Easier since it's automatically created for you, and better in that you are not only defining the relationship between the child and the parent, but also the parent and the child at the same time.

For example, (families are the obvious one) I can define the relationship between a father and son. In one direction the relationship is SON and in the other it is FATHER, allowing me to find all the SONS or all the FATHERS. And I can also have a DAUGHTER relationship from another customer and see the FATHER relationship to both of them, and a MOTHER relationship with them, too. I could have done this in TIMSS 5, but I would define the relationships as "FATHER-SON", "FATHER-DAUGHTER", "MOTHER-SON", and "MOTHER-DAUGHTER". And to find all the fathers, I'd have to search for both "FATHER-SON" and "FATHER-DAUGHTER" instead of just FATHER in TIMSS 6.

The place you will really see it is when looking on the relationships tab in the TIMSS 6 application, because the description is right there on the screen spelled out (this is the customer's father, or this is the customer son). In TIMSS 5 it was not always so easy to see who was who on the relationship screen.

Now you can have the reciprocal relationship be the same as the regular relationship. For example, an employee can have a STAFF relationship with a company, and the company can have a STAFF relation back to the employee. The thing to be careful with here is that hierarchical relationship is not defined, so when you looked at the relationship between these 2 customers you would see a STAFF in each direction, so who works for whom? Well it's obvious because one is a company and has a different record type. But if they were the same record type you couldn't tell.

So you need to be careful when defining hierarchical relationships, especially between customers of the same record type as there will be no way to distinguish them. There are cases where the relationship between to customers of the same record type really is the same in both directions (FRIENDS, BROTHERS), but when it is hierarchical, you will need to define a different reciprocal relationship (a CORPORATE relationship of SUBSIDIARY and a reciprocal of PARENT COMPANY) so you can tell them apart.

Applies to: TIMSS6