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What are linked records?
Linked records are a powerful feature in your SmartSuite workflows. They exist to "link" one record to another record in a way that allows information to be easily accessed across your solution from one app to another. Linked records are the data relationships that exist within a solution.
They eliminate redundancy, enforce data integrity, and help create relationships between your data.
Should my field be a linked record field?
If you are creating a simple app with tasks, status fields, and other basic field types, the standard field types may be enough,
However, if you wish to connect multiple apps together and establish relationships between them, you need linked records.
For example, if you want to create a solution to manage your simple process you may only need a single app and some various fields. You can create a text field to name the process, status fields, a select field to add categorical tags to each task for sorting, grouping, or filtering, a due date field, assign to field, and a checklist field for subtasks.
Because these processes can exist independently and do not require relationships with other records in this app or others, adding a linked record is not beneficial.
However, in many cases, you do want a connection between two apps to share references to records between them. Linked record fields facilitate these relationships, allowing you to view and use linked information.
For example, if you’ve decided to create an Agency Marketing solution you could have an app for client projects, clients, and another to track tasks related to each client. Here, all the relevant tasks, along with the client the project pertains to are linked to the Client project app.
If you created only one app for both things, you would have to re-enter information for each client or contact every time you added a new production task. You can eliminate this extra work through linked records.
In this situation, every time you create a new client project you can simply add an existing client and tasks to the project and avoid unnecessary data entry.
Linked records go both ways, when you add new tasks to the Production task app, you can also link the client it pertains to there.
Any time you want to view that client's information, you don’t have to switch apps. Instead, you can expand the linked record and access that information directly from the Client Project app.
