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:
- Bucket A: Highway Segment (linked upstream to a customer)
- Bucket B: Checkpoints (child of Highway Segment)
- 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.