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How to clean up too many relationships?

  • November 29, 2022
  • 0 replies
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How to clean up too many relationships.

I worked on an app ~ HIT. It's a hardware app for the hospital. So it is an inventory of hardware and software assigned to employees.

I just cleaned up a section to show the specific hardware assigned such as ( AHL-DESK-1063 - Laptop -  -  -). the dashes in this example show data that isn't in the table, which is okay.

Then for one employee they show all the data fields filled out. (AHL-LAP-2079 - Laptop - Hewlett-Packard HP - ProBook 445 G7 - Win 10 Pro x64)

I have another form to work on, maybe two to fix too.

But I have noticed quite a few relationships, especially for two tables. Some show the same relationship twice, and some have the relationship reversed, which is acceptable. 

But is having the same relationship twice unnecessary? I know the lookup fields and summary fields may be different on the two 'identical table relationships'. It just seems that duplicates should be removed, but make sure the lookup fields and summary fields are kept in at one of the table relationships?

I guess I'm looking for a tutorial on cleaning up relationship diagrams in QuickBase? See two images uploaded.

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Bob T.
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    • JohnCrosland
    • Registered
    • November 29, 2022

    Good morning Bob,
    If the reference field is not scalar (ie. a formula or a lookup field from another table), then you are not going to be able to summarize that tables data if you change the relationship.

    If you have a way to make it into a scalar field, then cleaning up the relationships is just time consuming. Then open both relationships and you can reassign each of the lookup fields and summary fields from one of the relationships. In the pictures that you showed it is unclear what fields are tied to which relationship. It seems like Related Hardware is an auto-generated scalar field inside of Assignments and the Hardware - Asset Tag was added at another point.

    I don't think that QuickBase is going to be breaking that functionality any time soon. They allowed summaries against calculated fields for several years, and a lot of companies still use those legacy designs. It is relatively recently (within last 2 years) that they started preventing new summary fields in that situation.  There is nothing that is going to prevent you from having multiple relationships between the same tables. I had 50 scalar fields that were references to the same parent table. I needed to create 50 dropdowns for an order form. I generally will have 2 relationships to the same table. One formula and one scalar. 

    Thank you,
    John



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    John Crosland
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