Type Heirachy
Fusion Connect provides full support for hierarchical data modeling and has native hierarchical relationships.
- Groups can contain both resources and other groups
- Resources can contain other resources and processes
- Activities are always attached to a resource
- Processes may contain activities of one or more types, and can be children of one or more resource types.
Hierarchy Examples
A resource or group type can have many different parent types. For example, if a spare part can be stored in a storage room or be loaded onto a vehicle, both the "Storage Room" and "Vehicle" types will be containers for the "Part" type. However, each concrete group or resource only has one parent object.
A Part resource can be in either a storage room or vehicle, but not in both places at the same time. In contrast, activities can both be attached to a single resource and be included within a single process; after all, since activities are always attached to resources, the ability to include them in processes would be meaningless if it was mutually exclusive with attaching them to resources.
Recursive relationships are prohibited on the type level. If vehicles can have parts as children, a part cannot be the parent of a vehicle; furthermore, if a fleet resource can contain vehicle resources, which can contain parts, then parts cannot contain fleets. Missing levels are supported, however. For example, if a Building object includes storage rooms, and storage rooms can contain parts, then buildings are allowed to have parts as children. A part, then could have as a parent either the storage room of the building itself, but not both.
