Relationships Table

JoAnn Strommen:

Go for it Karen!  Yes, I agree mother/father could be combined.  If you need to pull 'mother' relationships for some reason you should be able to accomplish that thru filtering other fields. I found I had limited # of several relationship types that I combined.  As long as you can pull when needed, have fun cleaning out that list.

JoAnn Strommen:

What I was thinking about is that if I want a query of mothers, I shouldn't have to use relationship/reciprocal to find them.  If I have a relationship/reciprocal of 'parent', I can add gender to my filters and generate a list of "mothers".  For my use, 'parent' works for us. At this point I don't think we've utilized relationship attributes at all.  But that may be because of what type of org we are and our use of RE.  In other areas where we do you attributes, I use tables whenever possible for the data entry which helps keep things much cleaner.


If you have info like grandparent, great grandparent it may be there because you need it.  Don't go on a cleaning spree until you know. Are you a school that has a grandparent visitation day?  If so, you need it.  To me, you wouldn't need grandmother and grandfather.  You could just use grandparent.  (You must know gender if you're specifying mother or father.)

Now I'm not so sure how to handle it at my org. I actually kind of feel bad, because we have a lot of cleanup to do from people who were here in the past, and I shared this situation with the Development Assistant in a spirit of, "Hey, get a load of this! Our Relationships table is so bloated! We have an entry for Grandmother-in-law!" She then said, "I actually added that one."




Evidently the reason we have so many of these is that we include Relationships as part of our recordkeeping for Tributes. It will warrant further discussion, as I don't think that's a field we actually print on the cards or anything, and it remains to be hashed out how necessary it really is to be so specific. However, Jen mentioned in her case that she questions whether it's even worth the time to address the issues in her org's Relationships table, and given the other cleanup I have to take care of, I think I'm in the same boat. If I would end up retaining all of this information in Attributes anyhow, then it would mean a lot of work to consolidate table entries and add Attributes for the relatively small gain of having a shorter list to scroll through. Meh. We'll see.

 

Karen Martin:

Good afternoon! I'm a newbie to RE and have inherited quite a cluttered system. My current goal is to work on cleaning up the "Relationships" table in which there are 51 entries. My instinct is that this is overkill but I have nothing to compare it to. I have several entries that I feel could be combined into one description such as mother and father could be "Parent" or brother and sister could be "Sibling". I'm not sure what the best practice is with this. Is it better for it to be broken down with such specifics? I would appreciate some advice for how your organization handles this particluar table. (I work in a community college setting.)


Thank you!


Karen

Sarah Krenicki:

Karen Martin:

Good afternoon! I'm a newbie to RE and have inherited quite a cluttered system. My current goal is to work on cleaning up the "Relationships" table in which there are 51 entries. My instinct is that this is overkill but I have nothing to compare it to. I have several entries that I feel could be combined into one description such as mother and father could be "Parent" or brother and sister could be "Sibling". I'm not sure what the best practice is with this. Is it better for it to be broken down with such specifics? I would appreciate some advice for how your organization handles this particluar table. (I work in a community college setting.)


Thank you!


Karen

This is an old thread, but I was directed here from a newer one, so here I am. I suppose I'm about to win some unwanted award here, but I have 411 (!!!!!) table entries to work with. There are the obvious like the aformentioned "former wife, wife-divorced, exwife, etc" but I also noticed there's every job title under the sun, which seems to make no sense as there's a separate place to long business information and job title, but here we are. I'm afraid if I want to cut any of these down, I'm going to have to go in each record which uses this and manually put the information in the right place, which is hundreds of records, so I'm averse to such a time consuming change in policy. A long term project, perhaps? Any suggestions on how to even approach this?


(My more immediate concern is to fix all the records where someone thought they should record the relationships in the "notes" section rather than the "relationships" tab. I'm crying just thinking about it.)