Summary Relationships are no longer encouraged…

Historically, if you wanted to have a many to one relationship, you would use something called ‘Summary Relationships’ (i.e. the OLD way.) This approach had some drawbacks and so a NEW way has been developed - simply called ‘Topic Summary’. You can see the difference below:

Why?

Those drawbacks (of the old way) I mentioned.

• Whilst it looked ok, it didn’t really convey that the topics were being summarised.

• Creating the summary relationships was inefficient (and non-obvious.)

• Adding/removing topics from a summary required relationships to be created and destroyed (time consuming.)

• The summary topic was not part of auto layout and so could end up overlapping other topics.

• One of the summarised topics had an expand/collapse button - meaning the summary topic could be hidden (confusing.)

Advantages of the new way:

• Simpler to administer (select the topics then hit ‘Summary’)

• Looks more like a ‘summary’ (with different bracket styles and colours possible.)

• Fully integrated into the auto layout system (no overlapping topics.)

• Drag/drop topics in/out of the summary.

NB: The old way is still supported - but it may need to be enabled in the Preferences.