Once you have more than one table in your TeamDesk application, the relationships become its core functionality. They allow you to pull and calculate the information from related tables.
To display the relationships TeamDesk provides two lists. One, accessible from the left side bar displays all relations in your application. And when you select the table and click on Manage Relations link on a main page, the list is filtered to display only the relations from and to selected table.
Good, but what’s next? We tried to display essential relationship information in its name: table names, a key and reference columns. But there are much more; what are match conditions? which lookups and summaries are created on the relation? which view is used to display the details?
This information is not displayed on the list; in order to browse you should select the relation and go to relationship information page. Click, click, click… that is what we want to get rid of.
See the screenshot from TeamDesk Idea Exchange application
Here, we try to display all the information you may need from the relations in a current table context.
References section displays the list of master tables (one-side) the selected table (many-side) is connected to as groups. Under the group, lookup columns are listed. The relationship description is now human readable: Ideas table references Categories table via Category field. From there you may edit relation’s settings (Edit button), delete it (Delete Button) or add new lookup column without going inside.
Selections section displays the list of detail tables (many-side) for the selected table (one-side). Match conditions, detail views and complete information from summary columns are at your fingertips as well.
We found the new list much more convenient than the old one. To see it in action, navigate to Setup, select the table, on the main page click Manage Relation link in the Table section. Then append the string “&new=” (without quotes) to the URL, try it and tell us what do you think.
