Associating documents in Lotus notes

Question

When a document is associated with another document (e.g. as address connected to a customer), how does notes stores the information? Does it create a new document to represent the association or does it tags the linked document as a response document?

Answer 1

I'm guessing you're asking because you are reviewing someone else's database, but in case you're starting from scratch and want to know the best approach I'll answer that too.

The short answer: Notes isn't relational. I'd bet the address is stored in the same document as the customer.

The long answer: If there are separate customer and address documents, there are usually some loose connections between the documents, perhaps based on a UniqueID field or perhaps just a name. For instance, the customer form might look up to an address view and pick that address based on the customer's name, meaning the address documents have the customer's name stored on them.

Sometimes a link can be created via the parent/child relationship of documents and responses, but that's more often used in discussion thread databases or very special cases.

Ultimately it's up to the developer of the Notes application to decide how to link the data. My suggestion, especially if you come from a relational db background, is to use the @UniqueID formula in a hidden text field that is computed on compose. That will stamp a GUID on your document and you can use that for referencing the document like you would a foreign key to a table. That helps to keep data somewhat normalized.

There is no automatic way that Notes associates one document with another, except for response documents, which when created get set with a $REF item that include the GUID of the parent document. Again, this isn't an ideal way to relate documents like customers and addresses because the relationship can't be leverage to make development easier. The document/response hierarchy is mostly just useful for organizing documents within a view.