Hierarchical Relation Fields

Fibery supports creating hierarchies of entities where entities of the same type (e.g. meeting types) can be nested inside others, thus creating a hierarchical list or tree type structure. This can be visualized quite well using the smart folders as well as the hierarchical list views (see also Representing recursive relations).

However, when a relation field is added to another type, the hierarchical nature of the original type is not represented in the drop-down in the UI. This makes it difficult for the user who is unfamiliar with the structure to make sure that the relation is made to the correct level of the structure. This is exacerbated when you consider that there may be entities with the same name at different levels of the structure:

I am hoping that while working on the implementation of [APPROVED] Relationships filter, some thought would also be given in better representing hierarchies. I know it would be tricky and likely ugly to have a hierarchical/tree view inside a dropdown so it might be necessary for these situations to open up a pop-up where the hierarchical view can interrogated and a choice be made:

I’m testing out a complex hierarchy of internal and external products, product instances, dependencies, etc, for our technology and business policy stack.

We have a Fibery Database, call it “Thing”. “Thing” has a 1 Parent Thing and many Child Things. I’m discovering that Thing needs to have ANOTHER one-to-many field: A Thing has 1 Type Thing and many instances of Things (of itself as a type).

In List view, we can display top-level Databases as nested using the recursive nest display feature. However, if my Database has more than one “one-to-many” relationships with itself, there doesn’t appear to be a way to select which relation to use in the List view.

Am I wrong? How does Fibery internally select which one-to-many field to prioritize, so maybe I can just trick it into using the one I need displayed most?