With Lookups, relation to Lookup visible in "Looked Up" entity?

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1

Hi Guys,

I have been using Lookups and just noticed that when I create a lookup, I don’t seem to be able to see a relation to the entity which has the lookup from the “looked up” entity.

What I mean is this:

I created a lookup here in the Gist Planning app:

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This is the “looked up” entity, the “Improve SEO” Objective:

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I was expecting to see a reference back to the entity with the lookup, since there is now a relation created. In red highlighted is the “source” of the lookup in the previous entity, the “common” entity that ties the lookup together. I added the relation manually (highlighted in yellow). It’s empty as right now as far as I can tell the lookups don’t go “two ways”?

With “regular” relations in Fibery, it’s nice that when you create a relation, in the “related” entity that relation back to the “relating” entity is automatically created, and they stay synced. If I have misunderstood with lookups and they also work this way, could you please let me know how?

If Lookups only go “one way” right now, I’d like to request that you guys build out the functionality of two-way like with the regular relations. Lookups are a another really differentiating feature of Fibery, it would be great to have the “complete” functionality with the two-way sync I’m describing here.

Thanks guys!

2

@B_Sp Lookup is just a field that populated based on relations, but we are not going to make it bi-directional, in this case it will just duplicate relations functionality and make things more complex.

However, what you need is a Lookup Collection (as we call it internally), this is something we are going to add soon. In this case in Objective you will be able to add Ideas Lookup that will collect all Ideas linked to Initiatives linked to this objective. Note that this will be not a real relation, but just a way to extract information from lower levels.

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Michael, hey and thanks for this explanation. That’s great as I was actually hoping to just see this as a sort of extra “field” of data, not so much set up a relation.

4

Hi again guys, please forgive the barrage but just eager to understand as much as I can!

Micheal, as a particular use of what I think you are speaking of re: the Lookup “visibility” in a Collections, is this a good example?

What I’m trying to do here is set up what I think may be a typical situation in CRM:

  • Company - a sort of “hub” of all that goes on with one of your clients
  • Contact - the actual rep at the client with whom certain activities are done: Conversations, Deals, etc.
  • Conversations - one type of “activity” as mentioned above.

As through the life of a Client, there may be various individuals that you interact with, which are the “contacts” in this case, I wanted to use Fibery’s flexibility to give a way to track each of these reps. My team has found this useful as we frequently have multiple reps of a client we work with through the history of a contract.

So what I’ve done here is set up the Contact, “E Jones,” as the entity to have this Client Conversation. That Client is tied to the Company “J Inc”, so I used the Lookup to show in the Conversation which company this conversation is carried out with:

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So here back in the Company card - which again I’d like to use as a sort of “Company Hub,” right now I don’t pick up those conversations connected via the Lookup.

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But if I’ve understood you correctly, the “Lookup Collection” you speak of will show these conversations, just not have a true “relation” in the Fibery backend.

I think that’s a terrific solution. You don’t need the actual relation, but the visibility is absolutely useful, and missing right now.

In fact, I think what you are talking about would fulfill one of my mass of requests in here :blush:, because this does exactly what I described in this one:

Thanks again guys, and hope this is all useful too you and not overwhelming!