Forum Discussion

HeatherBryant2's avatar
HeatherBryant2
Qrew Assistant Captain
9 years ago

Cross-App Relationship v. Sync Table

I'm in the beginning stages of building a platform of applications for my company's facilities' managers. I've built an application named Facilities, which I will use as my master app. I'll have around 10 other applications who's records will need to be related to one of these Facilities records. My question is - should I bring the Facilities table over as a Sync table in each of these applications, and create the appropriate relationships within each individual app? Or should I just keep the Facilities table as is, and create cross-app relationships to the various apps/tables? It could end up being around 30 or so cross-app relationships.

What do you think is easier to maintain?

Thanks!
  • MCFNeil's avatar
    MCFNeil
    Qrew Captain
    9 years ago
    There are a few downsides to doing cross-app relationships.

    One: Any user of the child apps, also has to be a user of the parent app with permissions to see the information of the said "facility".  Otherwise the dropdown fields appear blank.
    Two:  I've heard that this can cause performance issues, especially if you want to pull summary information back to the facility

    The big question is:  Why do you want them to be separate apps, why not keep it all together?  This will give you a lot more flexibility down the road and avoid any synced tables (which is very finicky, and not very easily modified) 
    • HeatherBryant2's avatar
      HeatherBryant2
      Qrew Assistant Captain
      9 years ago
      Hi Matt, Thanks for the response. To answer your question, I don't really know why I Would separate them all out. This makes me re-think my strategy - thank you! I think I Will go the cross-app route and combine multiple apps into fewer.
    • AryehZelczer6's avatar
      AryehZelczer6
      Qrew Trainee
      8 years ago
      There is a reason to separate them. If you would want to give each facility manager full access to make app changes without affecting the facility table or other peoples info.
  • LauraThacker's avatar
    LauraThacker
    Qrew Captain
    9 years ago
    Personally I never recommend the sync option because you cannot add any data to that table.  I always, unless for a better reason, would recommend table-to-table relationships using Cross Application Relationships.  Also you can send data back to the parent that way without issue.

    When you build the cross-application relationship, you will set the access permission to the highest-level role to ensure that the connection and lookup fields work correctly.

    I have many QuickBase customers using centralized-applications for storing centralized-data common across a business; and it is generally the smarter way to structure data to avoid a) duplication and b) bad data entry.

    Syncing severely limits what you can do with the data in the synced table, and generally requires a higher level of knowledge for connecting data to the synced table.  If you want to "replicate" a data table in an application so that you can set other characteristics and attributes to it; consider instead Table-to-Table relationship imports which can copy the data from your "master" source, but still provide you the flexibility of a customizable table.
    • HeatherBryant2's avatar
      HeatherBryant2
      Qrew Assistant Captain
      9 years ago
      Thank you! Having not used Sync tables in the past it's helpful to understand the limitations/complications. I will go the cross-app route. It's worked for me in the past. Thanks!