Evidence Relationships

Evidence entities can naturally relate to each other. The common types of logical relationships can be categorized as follows:

The evidence exists in isolation; it has no relationship (or dependency) on any other evidence. It is a standalone evidence and therefore has no child evidence records.
An evidence entity has a specific parent evidence entity and this is a mandatory relationship. The child evidence cannot exist without having a parent evidence record of this type.
An evidence entity has a single parent evidence entity. The parent evidence could be one of many parent entities, but it must have one and only one parent evidence. In other words, a child evidence record of this type cannot exist without having a parent evidence record, but the type of the parent evidence may vary.
An evidence entity has a single parent evidence entity. The parent evidence could be one of many parent entities but it does not always have a parent evidence. It can exist in isolation and hence, the parent/child relationship can be considered optional between the two evidence entities.
An evidence entity has more than one type of child evidence.

An evidence entity may fulfill more than one relationship role. For example, an evidence entity can be the parent of another evidence entity and the grandparent of an additional evidence entity. In a grandparent-grandchild relationship, the 'middle' evidence entity is both a parent (of the grandchild), and a child (of the grandparent).

The evidence framework includes the evidence relationship entity. This entity is used to store the relationship information between evidence records. The following table describes each of the attributes in the evidence relationship entity:

Table 1. Attributes in the Evidence Relationship Entity
Attribute	Description
Evidence Relationship ID	Unique identifier of the evidence relationship record. This is the primary key used to identify the evidence relationship record in the system.
Parent ID	Identifier of the parent evidence descriptor record. The system reads the parent evidence descriptor record to retrieve the parent evidence record.
Parent Type	Evidence type of the parent evidence record, e.g., income evidence. Both the parent ID and parent type are used to identify the parent evidence record in the evidence relationship.
Child ID	Identifier of the child evidence descriptor record. The system reads the child evidence descriptor record to retrieve the child evidence record.
Child Type	Evidence type of the child evidence record, e.g., income usage evidence. Both the child ID and the child type are used to identify the child evidence record in the evidence relationship.

The system uses relationship information to filter the evidence displayed in the evidence sub-tabs that are within the evidence object tab. When accessing a child evidence object sub-tab, the system searches for the child evidence records that are related to the parent evidence record. While there may be any number of evidence records for the child evidence type, only those evidence records that are in relationships with the parent evidence record will be displayed in the sub-tab. For example, a user can access the Asset Ownership evidence sub-tab for a parent Current Asset record evidence object tab. The system will read the evidence relationship table to retrieve only the Asset Ownership evidence records that are related to the parent Current Asset evidence record. The evidence object tab is described in Evidence Object Tab.