Introducing Relationships

So what is a relationship, and why are they important for our app? Just as a personal relationship is a two-way association between two people, in terms of relational data, a relationship is a two-way association between two objects. Without relationships, we could build out as many custom objects as we could think of, but they'd have no way of linking to one another.

For example, after building a Position object and a Job Application object, we could have lots of information about a particular position and lots of information about a particular candidate who's submitted an application for it, but there would be no way of seeing information about the job application when looking at the position record, and no way of seeing information about the position when looking at the job application record. That's just not right!

With relationships, we can make that connection and display data about other related object records on a particular record's detail page. For example, once we define a relationship between the Position and Job Application objects we just talked about, our position record can have a related list of all the job applications for candidates who have applied for the position, while a job application record can have a link to the positions for which that candidate is applying. Suddenly the “people” at our Recruiting app “party” know some of the other guests, and the app just got a lot more interesting.

Relationships Allow Information about Other Object Records to be Displayed on a Record Detail Page