Multi level related tables

Question

Just a general question, no specific need but was curious about this.

Can you pass data through multiple parent child relationships or is it best to relate at several levels.

For example....

Lets say I have a table for projects, opportunities, service calls and tasks.

Projects have many opportunities
Opportunities have many tasks
Projects have many service calls
Service calls have many tasks.

On the projects table I want to see all tasks for that project.

Do i relate tasks to projects or report link through the opportunities and service call relstionship to get all of the tasks?

What if there is another layer to the hierarchy?

Just generally curious about best design there.

Thanks!

quickbasecoachd · Answer

Imho, the best practice to walk the look up's successively down the relationships as many levels deep as you need. Do not create needless relationships.

ivanweiss · Answer

So just create a lookup in each table to continue passing it. That makes sense. And what I figured as I would imagine relationships are the performance hit you could have in an app.

quickbasecoachd · Answer

The other reason is that as these look up the field to make their journey down the levels, you may in fact need many of those fields along the way. And it gets confusing when you have essentially the same field accidentally being looked up into the same record from the two different sources.

Also relationship diagrams tend to get complicated enough without turning the whole thing into a giant plate of spaghetti.

ivanweiss · Answer

Thanks Mark.&nbsp; I think I am going to look back over my app and see if I can make any corrective action before it goes live.&nbsp; Fortunately I have learned a lot, unfortunately some of the early development was before I realized a few things.So I think some things I can probably improve upon if I look back on some of that early stuff before it goes live.

quickbasecoachd · Answer

Ya, It's a good idea to devote a few hours to cleaning up you app. Get rid of dead fields. Any fields that end in 2 are suspect. Clean up all the Table Home pages. Set up all your default reports. Have a great dashboard. Clean up all your forms.  It's very easy to develop Quick Base apps quickly but leave a mess in your wake. So all apps need some tidy up time invested.

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Multi level related tables

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