question on many-to-many relationships

question on many-to-many relationships

Just wondering - what is the recommended approach to implementing many-to-many relationships?

E.g., let's say we have a customers form and a contacts form. Each contact can (optionally) be associated with one or more customers and each customer can (optionally) be associated with one or more contacts.

In this case, should we simply insert a multi-select import field (e.g. 'customer_name') in the contacts form (or vice versa)?

Or is it better to use a separate Customers_Contacts 'associative' form to handle these relationships?

(I'm just doing a test using the latter approach, but thought I would ask here as well.)

Thanks,
Anton