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About Many-to-Many Relationships for Custom Objects

By default, all relationships between Custom Objects 01, 02, and 03 and other record types are many-to-many. However, for all other custom object record types (for example, Custom Object 04), any relationship between the custom object record type and any other record type (including other custom object record types) is one-to-many by default.

You can create many-to-many relationships for custom object record types by using another custom object record type as an intersection table.

Example of Creating a Many-to-Many Relationship

Your company owns and manages conference centers, and provides conferencing facilities to other companies, government clients, and so on. You want to use a custom object record type to track information about events and another custom object record type to track information about the rooms that are used for each event. Each room is used for many events, and each event can use a number of rooms, so that you must have a many-to-many relationship between the record types.

To create this many-to-many relationship, you can use a third custom object record type as an intersection table to track information about each room booking, or session. You can then create a one-to-many relationship between rooms and sessions, and a one-to-many relationship between events and sessions, which gives you a many-to-many relationship between rooms and events.

The following procedure describes how to configure the record types and relationships for this example. Custom Objects 04, 05, and 06 are used for the new record types.

To configure a many-to-many relationship

1. If the custom object record types that you want to use are not set up for your company, contact Customer Care to have them set up.
2. When Customer Care has set up the custom objects, rename Custom Object 04, 05, and 06 record types to Room, Event, and Session respectively.

   For information about renaming record types, see Renaming Record Types.

3. For each user role that requires access to the new record types, set the required level of access in Step 2 Record Type Access of the Role Management Wizard. (The required level of access is determined by you, based on user responsibilities.)

   For information about setting up user roles, see Adding Roles.

4. For each user role that requires access to the new record types, configure the access profile for the new record types.

   At a minimum, you must set up the following:

   • On the new Room record type, grant View access to the new Session related information section.
   • On the new Event record type, grant View access to the new Session related information section.

     For more information about setting up access profiles, see Process of Setting Up Access Profiles.

5. Create new page layouts for the new record types:
   • On the new Room record type Detail page layout, include the new Session record type as a related information section.
   • On the new Event record type Detail page layout, include the new Session record type as a related information section.

     For more information on setting up page layouts, see Customizing Static Page Layouts.

6. For each user role that requires access to the new record types, assign the page layouts that you created in Step 6 of the Role Management Wizard.

   For information about setting up user roles, see Adding Roles.

NOTE: In addition to the configuration changes described in the preceding procedure, you can customize the new record types in the same way that you customize other record types. For information about customizing record types, see Record Type Application Customization Page.