Parent-Child Feature

The Parent-Child feature enables you to further enhance the connection and grouping of entities and elements. This feature provides a container for elements, which belong to the same entity.

Whereas the data model can be described as a 1:n relationship, one parent element can have an infinitive number of child elements, but a child element can only have one parent element.

The following table shows three examples of possible Parent-Child relationships. There are, however, many more possibilities.

Enable the Parent-Child feature

The first step is to enable the Parent-Child feature for a specific entity that you want to work with. Follow these steps to enable the feature:

1. Go to  Settings > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration and open the entity by clicking the Edit (pen) icon.
2. Look for the Parent-Child card (1) under the modules/features section and check the box on the left corner of the module card. 
3. When the checkbox is marked, the card should change its layout color from light grey to the system color. 
4. Select the child entity (2) from the dropdown list that appears. If you want to have a Kanban Board shown on the parent elements that show all child elements, check the Activate Kanban Board checkbox (3).
5. Do not forget to click the Save button (4) at the bottom of the page.

Create a parent element

You can create parent elements in the same way as all other elements in the system. See the article on creating a new element for more information.

Create a child element

You can create child elements in two ways:

1. Use the Create button to add a relation to a parent element. See the article on creating a new element for more information.
   Note: The relation to a parent element is mandatory.
2. Use the Submit action button on the right-hand side of the detail page of the parent element. Note: By creating the child element via the action button, the relation to the parent element is set automatically.

Note: When the Parent-Child feature is activated for an entity, a new static field Allow Submissions is added to the Field Configuration of the respective entity. The status of this static field controls whether a user is able to create child elements or not. If the Allow Submissions button is set to Active, the Submit Child button is available on the parent element, otherwise if the status is set to Inactive the Submit Child button will be disabled on the parent element. Also, if the Allow Submissions field is set to Inactive, no parent element can be added to a child element via the Relations tab.

Exploring and managing child elements

There are two ways to access the child elements:

1. Use the Board on the parent element. (1)
   Note: This feature must be activated on the Parent-Child settings. See Section Enable the Parent-Child feature of this article for more information.
2. Use the child tab on the detail page of the parent element. (2)

The Child Board

Configure the child board

1. Navigate to the Entity Configuration of the parent element and open the Kanban Configuration menu. (1)
2. Select any list field from the swimlane field (2). This field can be any single select list field from your child elements.
3. Don’t forget to click the Save button once you are done.  (3)

Filter the child elements

There is a Filter (1) section that allows you to narrow down the list of child elements in different ways:

1. By applying a Search.
2. By applying different Filters. The shown filters are:
• General filters, e.g. Followed by
• Child element filters e.g. all dropdown filters, or user search field filters
3. By applying a rating filter (if there are ratings configured for your child elements).

Manage the child elements

On the Board tab (here Idea Board) you find a Kanban Board with different swimlanes (2). The swimlanes can be defined in the Entity Configuration, see section Configure the Child Board for more information.

Each swimlanes has a title (here Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, Revenue). There is also a numeric indication how many child elements belong to this attribute (and based on your applied filter sequence) (3).

You can drag-and-drop the child elements to update them according to your needs.

Tip: Want to get even more out of the Parent-Child feature? Apply a workflow to the child elements. Check out this article for more information.

Inheritance of the visibility between parent and child elements

You can restrict the visibility of your parent and child elements, or rather, let the child elements inherit the visibility settings from the parent element.

Enable the visibility inheritance

Note: The Visibility Tab feature must be activated on parent and child entities. Please contact your Customer Innovation Success Manager for more information.

Follow these steps to enable the inheritance feature from parent to child elements:

1. Go to the Entity Configuration (1).
2. Edit the parent element Type by clicking on the edit pen (2).
3. Go to the Parent-Child Configuration tab (3).
4. Activate the Inherit Visibility to Child checkbox (4).
5. Click the Save button to save the settings (5).
6.  

Once the Visibility Tab feature on both entities and the inheritance feature is enabled, you can configure the visibility configuration for parent and the related child elements, on the respective parent element. Configure the visibility by following these steps: 

1. Go to the Edit form of an existing parent element or create a new parent element.
2. Open the Visibility Tab. (1)
3. Select Others (2) if you want to apply specific visibility restrictions. Select Invite all users (2) if all users with the permissions from its role should be able to access these Parent-Child elements.
4. You can select Users / Groups / Roles / Contexts. In this case the visibility is restricted to the Application Owner, Power User and Jane Innovation. (3) 
5. You can send a notification to all invited users by checking the option Send notification to the invited users. (4)
6. Do not forget to click Save or Save and Publish. (5)
7. Now, the visibility restriction is inherited by all related child elements.

Note: Once you set up the Visibility Tab on the parent and child entity, the Visibility Tab is hidden on the child elements. The tab is only available on the parent element. All configuration is made from there.