Relationship Records

Relationship records in Heurist link two Heurist records together, regardless of type. With this simple function, Heurist provides much of the power of many-to-many relationships in a conventional database, with a fraction of the effort.

Heurist relationship records have three very powerful features:

They are implemented as a standard Heurist record type, so they inherit all the characteristics of a Heurist record - they can be edited like any other record, they have a title, data fields, annotation, discussion, tags, ownership, even a geographic location;

They can link ANY two records, whatever their type - no prior knowledge or specialise programming is needed (with relational databases a separate linkage table, and programming, is generally required for every pair of record types to be linked);

They include, by default, fields for relationship type (required) and time period (optional) over which the relationship applies (many real-world relationships have a limited duration).

When editing a Heurist record, there is a special section which allows the creation of relationship records which link the record to other records in the database.

Current relationships are shown as follows:

New relationship records can be added by clicking on the Add a relationship link, selecting the relationship type and searching for another record (target) to which to link the current record (source)

Relationship records are a record type developed to link Heurist records together and identify the type of relationship that links them.

Relationship records are created by editing a Heurist record.

Select a Heurist record
Click on Relationships on the right-hand panel
Click Add a relationship
Select the type of relationship from the drop-down menu
Click into the Related record field (the Find records window will appear)
Select the record link to (and forge the relationship with) - or - create a new record to link to (the record appears in the Related record field)
Click Save

The required fields for a relationship record are:

Title
Primary resource (record being linked from)
Relationship type
Linked resource (record linking to primary resource)

Note: future versions of Heurist will provide a graphic relationship editor which will display a record's relationships as an editable network of relationships.