Using the parent <-> child relationship to create links between items has a lot of advantages :

 

1- you can directly see the items when they're linked (below the parent, or using the context parent, or just looking at the properties pane)

2- all parents or children are visible in the properties pane,

3- you can transfer data from one item to the other through inheritance or column equations,

etc.

 

However, some of these strengths are also weaknesses. One of them : if an item has multiple parents, which themselves are children of multiple parents, etc. column equations can rapidly spiral out of control and IQ's performance decreases dramatically. This is a big problem in my DB now. Sometimes an operation on 1 item takes 15s ! Imagine 100. And this is mostly because I use the parent-child linking a lot.

 

At this point, there is no easy solution to this problem. I can't convert these links to HTML links / hyperlinks as I would loose precious info :

1- If items a, b, c refer to an item "z" trough an HTML link , there's no way for me to quickly know that fact  if I'm just watching item "z" (with the parent-child relationship, I just look at the properties pane).

2- Since there's no reciprocal relationship, there's no way to see what other items are linked to the these a,b,c items, etc . unless I make a search for the IDitem, for each item individually. This would be tedious and inappropriate to be able to draw any map of the various relationships.

 

 

I thought about different solutions (using conditional column equations, etc.) but the only true solution to that daily annoyance seems to implement issue 54 (I think that's the one). Or maybe there would be an easy way for IQ to give a quick list of all html reference to an item ( a kind of "tag list", but "link list") ?

 

However, if somebody is aware of some other strategy, I'd really appreciate the feedback. The performance in my DB is really bad and I need to accelerate things a bit.

 

Thanks.

 

[Edit : note that there has been some discussions about various linking matters in the past -- but I can't find them at the moment]