Whats the best approach for a recursive parent-child association with inclusion of info about the association

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I have an m-n (recursive) association for an entitiy topic, but I need to store additional information about this association as well, like who created it, date created, remarks, etc. I have now created a separate entity HasRelationWith for that, with both a parent and a child assoclation to Topic and the additional attributes. Is this the best approach? I would like also to have the possibiltiy for a kind of reference set selector when creating HAsRelationWith for a parent Topic with multiple children Topics at the same time. How could I do that?
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2 answers
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An entity with parent and child association is a good solution.

For the GUI to look like a reference set you add a grid with a microflow button called add. That button opens a form with a grid (your custom select form) and on that form is also a microflow button that retrieves the list of selected items and in which you create the relations.

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The separate entity seems fine to me.

You can put a datagrid on the page that follows one of the associations to show HasRelationWith objects for a given Topic. Or use a microflow as datasource for that datagrid if you need more control over the objects shown.

To select multiple Topic objects create another page:

  • Starts with a dataview on Topic (the parent topic for which child topics are to be selected)
  • Shows a datagrid with Topic objects that may be selected as child topic and allows multiple selection.
  • To connect the topics, use a microflow button that receives the data grid selection and the parent object. This way you can link them. You may need to use a datasource microflow for your selection page if the end user may not select just any topic.

Be careful when creating a new topic and linking it to existing topics. You may run into the auto commit pitfall as described in this topic: https://forum.mendix.com/questions/7355/Autocommitted-Objects-Mystery

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