Connecting users, companies and products: relations, relation types and relation type custom fields in Arnica UnifiedLogon

May 16, 2015 by Igor Lozhkin
Arnica UnifiedLogon manages different types of information entities: users, user groups, application roles, companies, products, applications, resources, resource groups, etc. These entities are connected to each other in variety of ways (for example, user membership in user group, user permission to access resource, etc.). For users, companies and products, UnifiedLogon supports an additional special type of connection: relation. 

UnifiedLogon supports the following relation classes:
  • User-to-user
  • User-to-company
  • User-to-product
  • Company-to-user
  • Company-to-company
  • Company-to-product
  • Product-to-user
  • Product-to-company
  • Product-to-product
Relations between users, companies and products may be established using one of the above-mentioned classes.

Within each relation class, UnifiedLogon allows to define relation types. The relation types are custom defined. For example, class company-to-user might have relation types: Customers, Prospects, Employees, Agents, etc. There may be unlimited numbers of relation types defined for each relation class.

When relation is established, it is always associated with a specific relation type. Same entities might have multiple relations within relation class, with different relation types. For example, the same user and company might be related as Customers and Agents at the same time.

Each relation type may have custom columns which may provide more detailed data about the relation. For example, relation type Customers from the example above may have custom columns LastOrderedProduct and LastPurchaseDate, while relation type Agents may have custom columns AgentRegion and AuthorizedProductLine.  

With nine relation classes, unlimited number of relation types within each class, and with custom fields defined per each relation type, the relation information connecting users, companies and products may be extended  to accommodate various business requirements.