Understanding the Relationship Viewer

The relationship viewer enables you to view, maintain, and add relationships for a specified business object, such as a company, site, consumer, contact, or ad hoc business object. You can configure relationship views that determine the relationships that appear in the relationship viewer. The relationship viewer is available as a standalone component, or you can access it from within the Company, Person, Site, Ad Hoc Business Object, and 360-Degree View components.

You can show four kinds of relationships in the relationship viewer: direct, indirect, peer-to-peer, and hierarchical. A direct relationship is established between two business objects of any type. For example, a direct relationship between a person and a company is established when you define the person as an employee of the company.

An indirect relationship is implied between two business objects that have the same type of relationship with a third business object. For example, even though two workers at a company work in different departments and are not directly related, they are indirectly related because each one has an employment relationship with the same company.

A peer-to-peer relationship is set up between business objects of the same type that share a direct relationship to a third business object of a different type. A peer-to-peer relationship formalizes an existing indirect relationship. Typically, you establish peer-to-peer relationships for the subset of indirect relationships that provide information that is relevant to the business objectives. For example, you might establish peer-to-peer relationships among the players on a company softball team to formalize the indirect relationship that these players already have to each other.

You can monitor relevant peer-to-peer relationships instead of viewing the entire set of indirect relationships. To continue the softball example, if the relationship viewer is configured to show direct relationships and peer-to-peer relationships, the relationship view shows that each player has a direct relationship to the company and a peer-to-peer relationship to the other players on the team. If you do not establish the peer-to-peer relationship among team members, you can only view all indirect relationships between each employee of the company, and you cannot identify which employees have a team member relationship to each other.

Hierarchical relationships show parent-child relationships between business objects. Relationship hierarchies are graphically represented with a tree format in the relationship viewer. Parent-child relationships are defined by the relationship type and the designation of business object 1 and 2 in the relationship, where business object 1 is interpreted as the parent and business object 2, the child.

The tree format view is not limited to true hierarchical relationships. You can also present peer-to-peer relationships in a tree format by designating one of the two roles as the parent when you set up the relationship view.

From all of the components that include the relationship viewer, you can view relationships that are created both implicitly and explicitly. Implicit relationships are automatically recorded to capture a relationship that is implied by a specified transaction. For example, when a company is associated with a contact by using the Company component, the system automatically records a relationship between the company and the contact: Contact - Company, relationship type ID 10. PeopleSoft CRM provides system data, including role types and relationship types, for all implicit relationships. You can manually create or update implicit relationships by using the relationship viewer.

You can manually create explicit relationships by using the relationship viewer that is available in the Company, Consumer, Representative, Site, and ad hoc Business Object components. To create these relationships, you must set up the appropriate control values and configure a relationship view to recognize this type of relationship.

In PeopleSoft CRM, each business object might have more than one role. Roles determine which default views appear in the relationship viewer.

For example, Jim Smith has both the Contact and Consumer roles and he is currently in focus on the relationship viewer. The Contact role has a priority of 1, and the Consumer role has a priority of 2. In this case, the default relationship views that appear for Jim Smith in the relationship viewer are those views that are defined for the Contact role.

The sample data that accompanies the PeopleSoft CRM installation CD contains these relationship views that you can modify to meet the business requirements: