October 23. 2007 23:49

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Titan) - Many to Many Relationships « Saiberspace’s Weblog

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October 24. 2007 07:24

Phil,

With respect to your selecting an influencer relationship to demo the many to many feature (yeah!) I am curious as to how you think this compares specifically to the built in relationship roles feature.

Do you think that relationship roles will disappear from use? When do you think this will be better than creating a m2m like you have demoed or the opposite?

Jerry Weinstock

October 24. 2007 14:02

Hi Jerry,
It’s a very interesting question and I thought a lot about it too. You really have to make some serious considerations when making many-to-many relations. The influencer scenario is a good example. It will properly work well for most of the cases, but consider an implementation using this structure for over a year and then the company suddenly needs to register the type of influencing. So the scope has changed and you need to add an “influencingtypecode” attribute to the joiner entity. You can’t do that! You have to create a new many-to-many relationship the “old fashioned way”, move all the existing relation data to the new structure and then delete the existing structure.

Also (in CTP3 at least) you can’t do workflows on these joiner entities, so you can’t trigger a workflow when a new influencer relationship is created. Is that going to change, Phil?

All in all I love this new feature but you really have to think twice when using them...

Casper Jensen

October 24. 2007 16:19

Relationship Roles is still a stand-alone feature in Titan. However we are taking a serious look at this feature for CRM5 and intend to built something special here.

You can't operate workflows on the N:N intersect entities - but you can on all custom entities (so if you use a 'linker entity' then you can have workflow).

Philip Richardson

October 31. 2007 01:44

Hi Philip,
thanks for the great screencast!
In the description you note "You can't store additional data on the relationship (but there is a different feature in Titan which enables this)."
Could you give some more details regarding this feature?

Regards,
Riaan

Riaan vandermerwe