Data Steward Guide

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Relationships and Relationship Types

During its transactions, HM uses relationships and relationship types to define and manipulate data. Database designers create entities, relationships, entity and relationship types, and profiles in the Hierarchies tool before working in the Hierarchy Manager tool.

A relationship describes the affiliation between two specific entities. Hierarchy Manager relationships are defined by specifying the following properties:

Property	Description
Relationship type	General class of relationship to which this particular Hierarchy Manager relationship belongs.
Hierarchy type	General class of the hierarchy under which this relationship falls.
Start and end dates	Specific period of time during which the relationship is considered active. (If the current date is outside of that period, the relationship does not get deleted, it is just considered inactive.)
Additional Attributes	Any number of additional attributes that can be defined in a customer implementation to provide additional information about a relationship. For example: status code, percent ownership.

The following figure shows example relationships between data.

Depending on the criteria, you can define relationships broadly or narrowly. Hierarchy Manager places no limits on the number of HM relationships an entity can have.

Relationship types describe general classes of relationships. The relationship type defines the following:

Types of entities that a relationship of this type can include

Direction of the relationship (if any)

How the relationship is displayed

For example, if your database has two entity types—doctor and hospital—the Hierarchy Manager relationship type between doctors and hospitals might be something like “Resident” or “Attending Physician.” As with entity types, the label you give to each relationship type should be something that makes it easy to identify.

Entity types can be shared between the relationship types. So it is possible to add a relationship type to profile, configure HM packages for entity types, then remove the relationship type. This will not remove the entity type/profile associations so these entity types and their packages can be reused later. You can also remove entity types - there is a special menu item for that shows up only when you click on the entity type below the profile item.

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Table of Contents

Data Steward Guide

Data Steward Guide

Relationships and Relationship Types

Relationships and Relationship Types