Parent-Child Form Record Linking

1 Overview

bxp has the ability to link any two forms together, in a parent child form structure. Any two forms can be linked if the following two conditions are met:

1) A field in the parent form contains a value that is also present in all of the records in a child form.

2) There is a field in the child database specifically used to store the link between a parent and child form.

2 Linking records in a child form to a parent form

To perform record linking in bxp, navigate the following path: Main Menu > Form Management > Form - Data Cleaning - Mass Update - Parent-Child From Record Linking. After clicking on this link you will be redirected to the first page of this process. From here select the parent form and the child form. These forms cannot be the same as one form cannot be the parent and the child at the same time.

There is no limit to the amount of child forms a parent form can have. A parent form can also be a child form for another.

After selecting the two forms, the following settings will need to be set:

1) Update all records or only the non-linked records - This setting allows the user to perform the record linking process on the entire child database, or just the records in the child database that are not linked to a parent record.

2) Matching field in the Parent form - This should contain the field in the parent form that contains a search value that matches a record in the child form

3) Matching field in the Child form - This should contain the field in the child form that contains a search value that matches a record in the parent form

4) Field to store the link - This should contain the field in the child form that will store the link between the child and parent form, it is recommended that this field is a campaign search question type

When bxp is performing the record linking function it will group all of the records, or just the non-linked records (depending on the users choice of function), and using the matching field of the child form search for a match in the matching field of the parent form. If there is a match, bxp will insert the bxp record id of the parent form into the selected linking field of the child form. If no match is found the linking field of the child form will contain 0.

Once the user has selected the desired fields they simply need to click the Perform Record Linking button at the bottom of the page, once this button is clicked the record linking process will commence. Depending on the amount of records in the child database this process can take up a minute to complete.

Once the record linking process has completed, the user will be redirected to the final page of this process. This pages purpose is to convey to the user the successful completion of the record linking process, this page renders a count of how many records in the child database that did not have a valid parent record found. If there are orphan records found, bxp will render a complete list of these records on screen and provide a user with a button to click through to an orpahn record and link it manually.