A relationship indicates a personal relationship between a person participant or prospect person participant and another person, e.g., spouse. When a relationship is added for a person participant or prospect participant, the system automatically adds a reciprocal relationship for the related person, if the related person is registered on the system . For example, if a spouse relationship is stored for a person participant, the relationship is also automatically stored for that person participant's spouse. Relationships can also be recorded for a person or prospect person when the related person is not registered on the system. The details of a relationship do not change over time. Rather, an individual enters into a relationship and can later leave it. For this reason, when maintaining relationship information in the system, users must either create new records or correct existing records and successions are not allowed.
Relationship records brokered from another case are processed automatically. In order to do this, the system checks the incoming record to determine whether the system should treat the relationship record as a new record, modify an existing record or consider it a duplicate of a record already held. If the relationship record is deemed to be a duplicate (where all attributes on the record match an existing record held) no updates are made.
In order to determine whether to add a new record or modify an existing one, the system checks if there is an existing record that is logically identical, by comparing all attributes except date fields. If the attributes match, the system then updates the existing record held with the details on the incoming record (where the incoming record has the latest received date). If none of the attributes match, the system will add this as a new relationship record.