Nesting Buckets with Upstream and Downstream Relationships

🧩 Nesting Buckets with Upstream and Downstream Relationships
 

Ontraccr’s bucket system supports nesting, allowing you to create layered databases that reflect real-world data relationships. This structure helps you model multi-level hierarchies like contracts → projects → equipment, or highways → checkpoints → GPS data.


🧭 What Are Upstream and Downstream Relationships?

Upstream (Parent): Entities linked to the bucket

→ Examples: customers, other buckets

Downstream (Child): Entities this bucket links to

→ Examples: projects, equipment, other buckets

These relationships are defined when creating a bucket and control how data is filtered and linked.


🔁 Buckets Can Be Nested

You can link a bucket to another bucket in both directions:

  • Make one bucket the parent of another (upstream)
  • Make one bucket the child of another (downstream)

✔ There is no mention of a limit to how many layers you can nest

✔ You can mix and match with customers, projects, equipment, and other buckets


📊 Use Case: Multi-Level Project Tracking

Example structure:

  1. Bucket A: Highway Segment (linked upstream to a customer)
  2. Bucket B: Checkpoints (child of Highway Segment)
  3. Bucket C: Equipment (child of a Checkpoint)

This allows you to create deeply structured data chains. For example:

Select a customer → See their highways → Select a highway → See checkpoints → Select a checkpoint → See equipment


🔄 Field Behavior with Nesting

Nested relationships directly affect smart filtering:

  • When you select an upstream item, downstream fields are automatically filtered
  • This chaining can occur across multiple layers, as long as each bucket is linked accordingly

🔁 Many-to-Many Linking Options

When setting up links between buckets:

  • You may be prompted to specify whether a relationship should be:
    • One-to-one (each item links to only one other)
    • One-to-many (each item can link to multiple others)

✔ You choose this explicitly during bucket setup when prompted (e.g. “Should multi-site inspections link to one or many?”)


🧾 Summary

  • Buckets support nested relationships through parent/child (upstream/downstream) linking
  • You can link buckets to other buckets in both directions
  • These relationships power smart filtering and enable deeply connected data models
  • Relationships can be one-to-one or one-to-many, based on how you configure each link

Nesting buckets gives you the flexibility to model multi-layered, interdependent data systems with precision.

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