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About Parent-Child Relationships

Many of the Oracle CRM On Demand objects interact with each other through parent-child relationships. A parent object refers to the main or base object of interest and the child object refers to objects that are related to the parent in some way—for example, if the child is contained in the parent, or if the child has records that refer to the parent.

These parent-child relationships can be one-to-many or many-to-many. For example, a lead can be associated with a particular account, but an account can have many leads associated with it. In this case, you can think of the relationship between the account and its leads as a one-to-many parent-child relationship.

Other relationships can be many-to-many, meaning that many children are associated with many parents. For example, a contact can be associated with several opportunities, or an opportunity can have several contacts associated with it. In this case, you can think of the relationship between contacts and their opportunities as a many-to-many parent-child relationship. The parent-child relationship between contacts and opportunities can be treated with either the opportunity as the parent with contacts as children, or with the contact as the parent and the opportunities as children.