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Types of Object Relationships
You can include almost any Salesforce object types in a Relationship Graph as long as they are related. Choosing which object types to include and which fields to use to match them before you start building your Relationship graph is a best practice.
To review how object relationships are defined in Salesforce, see Object Relationships Overview in the Salesforce help.
Vlocity doesn't limit which object types you can include in a Relationship Graph. However, because so many object type combinations are possible, not all combinations have been tested.
The first thing you must determine about any pair of related object types is whether they have a one-to-many or a many-to-many relationship.
One-to-many relationships are defined by Id references. For example, Account and Contact object types have a one-to-many relationship by default. An Account object can have multiple Contacts associated with it. Each Contact object has an AccountId field that references the Id of one Account object.
Some graph types, such as hierarchy graphs, support only one-to-many relationships.
Relationships between Contacts are often many-to-many. These include friendships, coworker relationships, family relationships, and so on. Matching field values isn't sufficient to match objects, because field values aren't guaranteed to be unique for each relationship. Therefore each relationship must be defined individually, in the record of a relationship object.
You have a choice of relationship objects for each type of relationship:
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If you have preexisting Party Model objects or you would like to define relationships between Contact, Account, and Household objects without creating custom objects, you can use the Party Model objects (Party Relationship and Party Relationship Type) that Vlocity provides.
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If you don't want to be limited to relationships between Contact, Account, and Household objects, you can create customer-specific Custom Junction objects, which can define many-to-many relationships between almost any related Salesforce objects.
