Connect relationships to virtual entities

This procedure describes how to add a relationship to a virtual entity.

  1. To add an relationship to or from a virtual entity, click and drag from the source entity to the target entity.
    A blue box denotes a relationship to or from a virtual entity.
    This displays the Properties panel with options to define the virtual relationship.
  2. In the Relationship Name box, enter the name for the new relationship.
    This labels the relationship between the two entities you are connecting.
    For example, if you were building a model of insurance data, the name might be "Visited" (between a patient entity and provider entity) or "Billed" (between a provider entity and an insurance company entity).
  3. The Virtual box will be checked if either or both of the entities connected by this relationship are virtual. It will be unchecked if both entities are physical.
  4. In the Connection box, select the connection for the virtual relationship.
  5. In the Schema box, select the schema containing the table that you want to use.
  6. In the Table box, select the name of the baseview or metaview join table whose properties you want to use for this relationship.
    If you do not have a separate table that links these two entities, as is often the case for one-to-one relationships, you can reuse the table you selected for the virtual entity that is being linked. In this case, you will choose the field that will be used as the primary key for the Source Link ID and Target Link ID created in step 10 of the procedure Create Virtual Entities. If you are linking two virtual entities, you can reuse either table as long as the source entity ID and target entity ID are the properties that were chosen as primary keys in the entity metadata.
    This populates the property Name and Data Type columns of the relationship properties table.
  7. Select the Link Source ID and the Link Target ID.
    These are properties of the source and target entities that have the values that will be matched in the join table. For example, if you were using insurance data and you had a source entity of medical providers and a target entity of patients treated by those providers, you might select "TIN" for the source and "ClaimNo" for the target.
  8. You can uncheck the check box for properties that you do not want to include in the entity.
  9. Click Save to save changes to the model.