How To Create Relationships Between Objects

2 minutes Last update 10 months ago

Whenever you save information to M-Files and describe what you are saving, M-Files connects it automatically to its context and creates relationships. Through these relationships you can move between information and see everything your information is related to.

Relationships

M-Files automatically creates relationships through metadata, as you can see in the example below. This document is related to a specific project and customer.

However, there are ways you can create direct relationships yourself to tell M-Files that a set of information is related by a common theme.

You’d use relationships in the same way you’d use a document collection.

Example of using Relationships

Employee 1 and Employee 2 are working on a document, and Employee 3 is doing some background work for them.
Employee 3 creates a document of all the information they have gathered, but now they need to link it with what Employee 1 and Employee 2 are working on. This is where the relationships come in.

Browsing Relationships

There are two ways you can browse through an object’s relationships.

You can browse the relationships by drilling down.

Alternatively, you can open the relationships menu to view everything with relationships from and to this object. To do this, simply right-click the object and select Relationships.

Creating a Relationship

There are two ways you can create a relationship yourself.

You can drag and drop the file into the object’s relationship window.

You can also click Add Relationship… in the Relationships dialog and simply select the object you’d like to add.

Once you open the dialogue, you can navigate around your M-Files and look for the document you want to connect. This is very useful especially if you don’t have the required document on your immediate screen.

Removing a Relationship

To remove a relationship, simply access the relationships, click Check Out, select what you’d like to remove, and click Remove Relationship.

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