How to display a hierarchy of related records

You can display related records in a tree-like hierarchical fashion. For example, a design component (DesignComponent object) may consist of sub-components; each sub-component may consist of other sub-components etc. To display a hierarchy of such components in a tree you need to define a reference attribute (called for example, SubComponents) in the DesignComponent object that refers to multiple other components (also DesignComponent object) – see How to define links between database tables.

Then open the SubComponents attribute for editing, go to the Presentation dialog and choose “Tree” from the “Display as” drop down. For more details see also the “Presentation Options for References”.

Another way of displaying a hierarchy is to display a standard grid of parent records first (Query using the Standard form) and then define a query that would show children records for a selected parent. Then set up the parent query to display the children query when a row is expanded (see Adding/Editing Queries section). For each children query you can also display an operation to show its children when a row is expanded.