Parent-Child Forms

Parent-child is a term used to refer to relationships between form instances where one instance is the 'parent' instance and from that parent instance, one or more 'child' instances are created.

A common way to show the relationship between a parent instance and its children is through the use of a Table object. A parent form would contain the Table object and each row in the table would represent a child instance related to this form, visually indicating the one to many relationships of the parent and child instances. The user can then select a row in the table and click a button to launch the child form instance.

Linked Forms

You may want to allow relationships between form instances that are not parent-child relationships, where neither instance could be considered a 'parent'.  Using the form instance ID, you can create an association between two separate form instances that are related.

For example, you have a form that manages product defects (when a user submits this form a product defect instance is created). You may want to associate a specific defect with another defect in order to indicate that they are somehow related. In this example, one defect does not "own" the others. They are merely related in some way.

Interactive Example

For a demonstration of parent-child relationships and manual linking, see the Parent and Child Forms Interactive Example topic (available only in the online  version of this help guide).

Updated: 06/12/2011  Page url: http://www.perfectforms.com/Documentation/manual/html/?fl_linked_forms_vs__parent_child_.htm
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