Relationships specific setups

Relationships became more important than the data nodes themselves. That is why graph database became so popular for the last few years. At first a graph seems simple, you have nodes, edges, and it is just a matter of connecting them, right? Well, it is not that easy. It is all about the dynamic. How these relationships evolve? If I create a new version of a document, what happens to its relationships with products, parts? We try to give as many options as we can through our G-Config admin panel. Here are some of the settings to manage relationships dynamics.

Lock Linked

Depending on the situation, some relationship may need to parent node to be in edit mode for the relationship to be edited. It is actually the case in most situations. But some customer's specific cases led us to allow sometimes to update relationships without updating the parent node. It is not opening the pandora box. Edit permissions are still checked and applied.

Config Manager

When running an Engineering Change Order or even if you just make a manual change, you may want to select which relationships will be included in your impact analysis. That is what this option is doing. It enables a relationship to be included in an impact analysis.

Undirected Relationship

We talked a few times about undirected relationships in our marketing actions. This feature is pretty unique as most graph database require a source and a target for each relationship. In terms of data management it has some direct consequences to allow relationships to be undirected.

Parent Config Freeze

This one is the one we always forget about. It is basically an override rule for when a child is versioned. By default you can configure depending on a versioning scheme whether a parent will automatically take the latest version of a child node. For some relationship if you want to override this and make sure that a release part do not get any change of its content on a specific relationship, you just need to activate this option.

Forbid Duplicate Rels

And the last one is much simpler. When you have a relation between two types of nodes, the relation itself can have more or less information. In some situations, you may want to connect multiple times a parent node with the same children node but with different information on the relationship. For a bill of material you may want to have specific placement information, therefore you allow multiple relationships between the same nodes. In case you just want to type the quantity and it makes no sense to have two relationships created between a parent and a child, then you should enable this option to forbid the duplicate relationships and prevent data quality issues.

Use the tooltips

Use the tooltip in g-config to remember what each option is there for. And if it is not clear feel free to reach out!