What are form Related Objects?
Simply put, a related object is an object connected somehow to the main object. There are generally two types of relationships supported by 3B Forms:
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| Child Relationships – child objects are usually what you can see in a “Related List” against a salesforce record. They are connected through one or multiple* fields through to the “main” object of the form.
For example, we have “Education” Object which records education history for a contact. On the Education Object, we have a field which points to the Contact object. This is what we call a “Lookup Field” which can be one of 2 types – Lookup or Master detail.
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| Parent Relationships – a parent relationship is where the record on which we have based the form on is the child in the relationship. This usually looks like a field on a record.
Here is an example where a Contact is linked to an Account. This is what we call “Parent Object Relationship” |
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*An object can have multiple Lookup Fields to another object, self-reference is also possible (where an object has a lookup to the same type object)
Using Child Records
Lets take an example, where we are creating a Form which will allow user completing it to log multiple Cases, connecting their Contact record to the Case.
To achieve this, we need to create a form based on the Contact Object and add a Related Object based on “Case” object.
- Click on “Add” Button and select “Related Object” and a pop up will open
- Give it a “Title” – this will be displayed on the form
- Search for “Case” in the Related Object drop down
- You may have more than 1 Case option available. Next to the name of the object, you will see the name of the connecting field. In the example below, we have 3 fields on the Case which look up to Contact
- Select the option that best suits your scenario
- The two tables (Fields to Choose & Fields Chosen) will re-fresh and you will be presented with all the fields on that related object
- Required fields will be automatically added to “Fields Chosen”
- Click on the fields you want to add and then click on “Add Selected”
- Set the toggle Repeatable to “Yes”
- Setting this toggle to Yes means that a user completing the form can create multiple records (user can create multiple cases)
- Leaving it at No will allow the user completing the form to only create one related record (user can submit only one case at a time)
| List of Related records – note Case (500) has multiple entries | Selecting fields to add to the form |
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That’s It!
Using Parent Records
Lets take an example, where we are creating a Form which will allow user completing it to create an Account and attach it to a newly created Contact.
To achieve this, we need to create a form based on the Contact Object and add a Related Object based on “Account” object.
- Click on “Add” Button and select “Related Object” and a pop up will open
- Give it a “Title” – this will be displayed on the form
- Search for “Account” in the Related Object drop down
- You need to look for the Account field in the “Lookup Objects” section
- The two tables (Fields to Choose & Fields Chosen) will re-fresh and you will be presented with all the fields on that related object
- Required fields will be automatically added to “Fields Chosen”
- Click on the fields you want to add and then click on “Add Selected”
- The toggle Repeatable will be disabled as you can only have one Parent in a Parent-Child relationship.
That’s It!
Notes:
- In the Related Objects pop-up, in the drop down “Related Object”, you will notice that against each entry there is a code in brackets (for example Contact (003)) – this is so we can identify which object you want to use in the scenario where you have multiple objects with the same name
- Remember to add a “Limit SOQL” statement to avoid exposing too much/irrelevant data to the form user if the form is going to be used in pre-populate mode