Hiercharchical Relational Database

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Posted by Mitchell Kastner
Aug 3, 2011 at 08:47 PM

I used to be an adept Microsoft Access hobbyist, but gave it up when Timematters was introduced, which I used to run my law practice.

I wouldn’t be messing around with outliners if Access were hierachical because relational databases allow one record—-from the Persons table, for example—-to be related (linked) to multiple records on another table——to the Cases table, for example. This is called a one-to-many relationship. Of course with the use of an intermediate “feeder” table you can relate many records from the Persons table to many records in the Cases table.

This works perfectly well with flat, non-hierarchical, but it does not work out all where the table consists of records that would have to be classified in ever deeper levels of classification; hence the need for a tree-like structure. For the academic papers I write, I reseach issues that easily runs five or six levels in depth; and a two-pane outliner would be fine if I could link the citation to the issue record I created and if I could link the author of the article I cited to the issue record. I think maybe I could do this in UR; I don’t know. I know I can do it in Brilliant, the relational database. http://www.brilliant.com. The problem is that I cannot figure out how to write or run queries in Brilliant. I have been spoiled very badly by QBE in Access. Let’s suppose I wanted to retrieve only those records in which James Butcher wrote an article in the ASAPIL Journal about the MMPI-2 Revised Clinical Scales. No problem with QBE.

Do you have any suggestions with CRIMPs?

Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 3, 2011 at 09:24 PM

I think you could do this pretty easily in UR - just set up templates for issues, citations, and authors, and then freely link them together as you see fit. Although there is an “item” attribute that lets you link directly to another item, the quickest and easiest way is to use the “logical links” (i.e., clones), which means your links appear in the tree. Also, the logical links mimic a one-to-many relationship, whereas the item attribute link only allows linking to one other item. Finally, you could use text links within an item’s notes, but I find this slower than just using logical links.

>Let?s suppose I wanted to retrieve only those records in which James Butcher wrote an article in the ASAPIL Journal about the MMPI-2 Revised Clinical Scales.

Setting up a saved search of this nature would be pretty easy, although the details would depend on both your item templates and your hierarchy.

Chris

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