Relationship groups are extremely adaptable and can be configured in many different ways, to meet the needs of many different business problems. Here are some of the most common ways in which you can configure relationship groups:
- Arbitrary addition of issues to form a relationship – Add an existing issue ID to the current issue, to relate the issues together, where the issue you are updating becomes a child of the issue ID that you enter. A typical use case is where you might have an issue which has some elements in common with another issue and you want to treat them together. For example, two customers may report the same fundamental issue, and you want to group these together. You require a mechanism to add issues to the common group, and to display the related issue when you are looking at any one of the issues. This forms Example 1
- Structured addition of child issues to a parent issues – Add any number of new issues as children to the current issue. A typical use case might be that you want to add a number of contacts to a customer’s definition as you might find in a CRM system. The customer record is the parent issue, and each of the contacts is a child record to the customer record. This forms Example 2
- Search for a single issue and populate the current issue with fields from the result – Create an add or edit layout which allows the end-user to search for results that are returned, and then insert values from the result into fields within the current issue. A use case may be to have a layout that creates customer complaints, but before entering the specifics of the complaint, the user is able to search for the appropriate customer and return all the details required into the current complaint. This forms Example 3
- Search for multiple issues matching specific criteria and choose results as a group to relate to the current issue – Example 4 shows how you might search a large set of test cases for a subset, and relate this subset to a current record, forming a test plan, where the records added as children form the test cases for the test plan. This is most useful when you want to make all the choices from the results at once and make the connection to the parent issue
- Search for multiple issues matching specific criteria and individually relate results to the current issue – This is Example 5. It is a variation on Example 4, allowing the user to click on individual results returned within the result set, and the individual result record is immediately related to the current parent issue. This is most useful when you want to scan the results and make individual choices on which records to connect to the parent issue.