Types of Relationships Between Parent-Child Record Instances

There are limits to how many child record instances can be associated with or separated from a parent record instance. As well, there are limits to the number of parent record instances to which a child record instance can associate. These quantities are determined by the relationships between the parent and child record types.

The most common association between record instances permits a one-to-many relationship, where you can have either of the following:

One parent record instance associated with many child record instances
One child record instance associated with many parent record instances

In these cases, a single child record type is associated with a single parent record type. However, there can be multiple instances of either the child record or the parent record. See One Parent Record Type to One Child Record Type.

You also have an association between instances that permits a many-to-many relationship. In this case, you have many parent record types and many child record types. Each parent record instance can have many associated child record instances. At the same time, each child record instance can have many associated parent record instances. See Many Parent Record Types to Many Child Record Types.

Currently, it is possible to define a one-to-one relationship by workflows or custom scripts only. For more information, see One-to-One Parent-Child Relationship Between Instances of Different Record Types.

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