Relationship graph

[E Gish]

Hi there,

Just a general question. We have 39 tables in our solution in the Engineering department. One of those tables is what we call the "job log" which stores the customers name, project name, city, state, country, etc... all assigned to a job number such as 1001-123. We use this same job number in many of our calcs to simply bring in the data so we cut down on typos.

In the relationship graph we can place a table occurance int ehre and label it "Job log" to associate it with the table. If we link that TO to all the other modules tha use it, it can have what they say is a "spidering" effect.Many link lines goign all over the place. No matter how well you organize your graph it gets busy.

To unclutter this, you can go to a Squid type effect where you make another TO of the same "job log" and call it "Job log 2" , 3, 4 etc... then you can move around the TO to organize it cleaner. Its orchestrates kind of a top down organization or grouping.

In simple terms this works fine, but behind the scenes it can reak havic. As mroe relationships are defined, they can become lengthy in description, and start to overwhelm you in number.

And behind the scens layoutrs baseed on Job log with 'table occurance:field name' sorts have to be reset if you ever change your links. Or layouts with multi table fileds can become cumbersome in the header sorts or fileds on its own layout.

FM does not allow us to use the same TO name for multiple instances on the graph. It adds the 2, 3, 4 etc to it.

Is there any way to have an "Alias?" of a table occurance without having to change the name? I realize a TO is an alias of sort of the original table.

This would greatly simplify the table occurance names and sorts and layout field/header setups.

If I change a link (Which I do not plan on doing very often) Its very hard to go back and reset all my setups. I track manuals and documentation, adn redoing some of my critical reports setups is difficult and time consuming. Its much easier when the base table to tables are linked directly with out "ghost" TO's.

When you use other table occurances, some relationships do not allow you to use the same layouts depending on which table the layour is based on. Even if 2 tables are linked exactly the same, a broken relationship may show fields nto displaying data.

Being able to have an exact alias TO in FM may be a good thing for future versions. Perhaps a new feature request.

I hope this is clear. If its not, ask away.

Thanks for your input