Linking Rules Single Dialogs Workspace

Use this workspace to set up rules for copying field information from "parent" customers, vendors and contact companies to their "children."

You can link customers, vendors, or contacts to parent tables, so that changes that you make to the parent automatically flow to the children. The rules that you set up in this workspace determine which data flows from the parent to the child.

Because the general functionality of linking rules is identical for customers, vendors, and contact companies, the term following examples use "customer."

Copying field information means that you can copy the information that you entered on a certain customer's information card to one or more customers' or company-specific customers' information cards. You can place customers in a kind of hierarchy, where one customer is placed as parent customer, and one or more customers are then placed as subordinate customers in relation to the parent customer. You assign a subordinate customer to a parent customer on the subordinate customer's information card in the Parent Customer island, where you specify the parent customer and the linking rule.

If you have defined a template customer in the System Information or Company Information workspace, Maconomy uses this customer as the template customer when you create customers. However, to have Maconomy automatically inherit information from the template customer, you must set up at least one linking rule for the relevant database tables (Customer and Company Customer).

Using linking rules enables you to quickly and safely fill in standard customers' or company-specific customers' information because the information that you enter on a parent customer's information card can be copied to subordinate customers' information cards automatically. The amount of information copied from a parent customer to one or more subordinate customers depends on the linking rule that you use in each case.

In a linking rule, you specify the standard linking method that you want to use in the current rule, as well as which exceptions you want to apply to the rule. For example, you can create a rule that uses the standard linking method "Full," which means that all of the information specified on a given parent customer's information card is always copied to the assigned subordinate customers' information cards. In the Linking Rule Lines sub-tab of the Linking Rules workspace, you can then add a number of exceptions to this linking method. Example exceptions could be that you assign the None linking method to the Name1, Name2, Attn., Phone, and E-mail fields. Specifying these exceptions results in Maconomy not copying information from these specific fields from the parent customer to the subordinate customers, because the content of these fields is meant to be unique for each customer.

In the Linking Rules tab, you can enter the name of the current linking rule and identify the database tables to be linked, as specified by the Parent Table and Subordinate Table fields. You can also choose the standard linking method to be used in the current linking rule. In addition, you can indicate whether the linking rule should be used as the standard linking rule for the selected database tables. You use a standard linking rule, for example, in those cases where you created a company-specific customer without specifying a linking rule on this company-specific information card. In the Linking Rule Lines sub-tab, you can create a number of specific field rules with assigned linking methods. With these specific field rules, you can thus specify a number of exceptions to the current standard linking method that you specified in the Standard Linking island.