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Relationship Types

EVA Netmodeler supports an unlimited number of relationship types. Each relationship type has an identifying icon, large icon, and names for each direction.

The icons in the identifying icon and large icons fields are used in many of the EVA Netmodeler browsers and reports to augment the textual description of a relationship type in the same way as Type icons are used to augment the textual description of information types.  

Relationships should be named to create meaningful sentences when they are used to connect two items. For example, we may have a Busines Unit that manufactures a given Product. We would name our relationship and inverse relationship as follows: "manufactures" / "manufactured by". We could then see these kinds of relationships in various browsers, for example:

Business Unit Brazil manufactures Product Coffee

Product Shoes is manufactured by Business Unit Italy

You can use the relationships to build a variety of structures between related items, including hierarchies (e.g. contains/part of); networks (e.g. precedes/follows) and any variety of cross references (e.g. belongs to/owns).

A relationship type can define a legal relationship between a type and itself - a so-called recursive relationship. Recursive relationships usually represent some sort of hierarchy between the items of the type, for example, the recursive relationship includes between the type Business Unit and itself could be used to represent the information:

Business Unit Brazil includes Business Unit Buenos Aires.

The same relationship type can be re-used in defining relationships between various types. E.g. The contains/part of relationship could be used between types Document/Document as well as between Project/Task.

EVA Netmodeler does not limit the type or number of relationships that you can define, or the number that you wish to associate with any particular type.

Some relationship types will automatically be associated with each new type you create, to manage security and to group types into domains for ease of administration.

All relationships in EVA Netmodeler currently allow many items of the first type to be associated with many items of the second type i.e. all relationships are potentially many-to-many