Unidirectional and Bidirectional relationships
Relationships can be configured as one way and two way relationships. A unidirectional relationship means that the flow of data is just one way. For instance, you have an Employee Management app with Employee Profile and Manager Details. In the Employee Profile, you can create a one way relationship with the Manager Details form to fetch data from the latter. This relationship does not have any bearing on the Manager Details form.
A bidirectional relationships mean that the flow of data is mutual between the related forms. With same example, let's assume the relationship between the Employee Profile and Manager Details is a two way or bidirectional relationship. All Managers would have a list of Reporting Employees based on the Employee Profile form. If the Manager in an Employee Profile form is changed, the change will take effect on that Manager's Reporting Employees list. The employee would be removed from the old manager's list and added to the new manager's list.
Purpose of bidirectional relationship
Bidirectional relationships are used to:
- Establish mutual interaction between connected forms and enable data to be automatically updated when either of the connected form values are modified
- Create strict one-to-one mapping of values
- Create data referencing across the connected forms
