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Introduction to Three Types of Associations between Worksheets

This article introduces the 3 types of associations between worksheets, and provides examples to help you better understand the control, [Relationship].

An application with multiple worksheets can be regarded as a database. There are three possible associations between the records in different worksheets.

  • One-to-One
  • One-to-Many
  • Many-to-Many

One-to-One Association​

This is a simple association. For example, a product corresponds to a number; an employee can only have a job number; in turn, only one employee or product can be found by a certain job number or product number.

The name and number of the product are the two properties.

Usually, you can store the one-to-one property information in a single worksheet, without creating multiple worksheets to manage them separately.

There is another kind of one-to-one association, which is a one-to-one association between different objects in a worksheet.

For example, in table tennis doubles, there is the one-to-one relationship between each player and his partner.

More Examples:

  • National flag (Each country has only one flag, and in turn, each flag represents one country.)

  • Spouse (Each person has only one spouse.)

One-to-Many Association​

It is a more complex but also more common association. For example, a customer can have multiple orders, but an order can belong to only one customer. The worksheet Customer stores the basic information of the customer, such as contact, company address, etc. The worksheet Order stores the basic information of the customer’s order such as order time, order amount, etc. You can associate two worksheets through the control [Relationship] because both require customer’s information.

In the figure below, a customer is associated with multiple orders.

The following is the details page of a customer.

An order can only belong to one customer.

More Examples:

  • Project-Task (Each task can only belong to one project, but a project can include multiple tasks.)
  • Supervisor-Subordinate (Each employee can only have one direct supervisor, but each leader can have multiple subordinates.)

Many-to-Many Association​

Take the relationship between people and task as an example, a person may be involved in several different tasks, and a task may have different participants. You can associate the worksheet Participant and the worksheet Task through the control [Relationship]. When you click a participant, you can view the related tasks; when you click a task, you can view the participants.

More Examples：

  • Doctor-Patient (Each doctor can receive multiple patients, and each patient can see multiple doctors.)

  • Customer-Product (One customer can buy many products, and one product can be purchased by different customers.)

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