Relationships between people

[akulmehta]

When handling clients it is very important to track who they are related to and how they are related - e.g. John is the supervisor of Jane. It would be good if Relaticle can track relationships between people. This idea probably needs more brainstorming. Happy to discuss.

[ManukMinasyan]

Yes, this works today with no code changes. Custom fields have a Record type that links one record to another, and People can point at People.

Setup

1. Workspace Settings → Custom Fields → People → Add Field, and pick type Record.
2. Record reveals a Lookup Type selector. Choose People.
3. Name the field after the relationship, because the name is what carries the meaning: Reports To, Supervisor, Spouse, Referred By.
4. Repeat for the other direction. Allow Multiple Values turns a single link into a list, which is what you want for something like Direct Reports.

On a person, the field is a live search over People records. Once saved it renders as a clickable link straight to the other person's record, and it shows up as a column on the People table.

So John is the supervisor of Jane becomes a Supervisor field on Jane pointing at John.

What it does not do yet

Worth knowing before you build on it. All of this is verified on a current build, not read off the docs.

No automatic inverse. Setting Dylan → Reports To → Tim does not fill in Tim's Direct Reports. Each side is stored separately and has to be set by hand.

One field per relationship type. The relationship is encoded in the field name, not in the link. Ten relationship types means ten fields, and there is nowhere to attach per-pair metadata (started on, strength, notes).

Type and lookup target are locked after creation. You can rename the field and toggle multi-value later, but you cannot change Record to something else or repoint People to Companies. Delete and recreate if you get it wrong.

Filtering only works on the multi-value variant. Filtering the People list by a single-value Record field returns no results even when matches exist. We found this while checking your question and are tracking it as a bug. Multi-value fields filter correctly.

Not sortable or text-searchable. Table sorting and search do not look inside a Record field.

Where the idea still has value

The mechanism is there; the modelling is manual. The gaps worth turning into an actual feature are:

1. Inverse sync. Declare Reports To and Direct Reports as two sides of one relationship and keep them consistent automatically.
2. Typed edges with their own attributes. A real relationship object carrying a label and metadata, so a single Related People field can hold "supervisor of", "spouse of", "referred by" instead of needing a separate field for each.

If either of those is what you are after, this is worth keeping open. If you just need to record who is connected to whom, the Record field covers it now.

[akulmehta]

Do you think there is any value in creating a separate "Relationship" model where we can track a relationship and it's inverse. This allows the users to create new relationships and enter its inverse form. For example,

• "Supervisor" and its inverse "Reports To".
• "Father" and its inverse "Child".

Then we should have "Relation" model which tracks person_1, person_2, relationship_id

So for example if there are two people who are related you can select them and either choose the relaionship or its inverse?

I think this can be very useful as we can lookup deeper network connections - which is really important in certain fields for CRM usage.