Using Multi References
Many-to-many relations in Database Manager: understand the junction table a multi reference represents, and when it fits better than a simple reference.
Introduction
Section titled “Introduction”Use a multi reference when records on both sides can relate to many items on the other side, such as meetings with many attendees or projects with many tags. This is the Database Manager path for many-to-many modeling, and its main value is that the junction structure is created and managed for you instead of being hand-built every time.
Know when a simple reference is not enough
Section titled “Know when a simple reference is not enough”A normal reference handles one-to-many: one parent, many children, with each child pointing back to one parent. A multi reference is different because both sides can relate to many records. Make that distinction before modeling the schema, otherwise you end up forcing many-to-many data into the wrong structure.
Create the multi reference from the table context
Section titled “Create the multi reference from the table context”Just like sub tables, multi references start from a table context in Database Manager. The important shift is conceptual: you are not adding a plain field, you are defining a relationship pattern that is represented as a junction table behind the scenes and kept visible in the manager.
Understand the generated junction table
Section titled “Understand the generated junction table”The generated multi reference is really a managed junction table. It stores the links between the two related tables, which is why this feature is the right solution for many-to-many data. It removes the need to hand-build the linking table, name its keys yourself, and wire the relation from scratch each time.
Why this matters for queries, forms, and UI components
Section titled “Why this matters for queries, forms, and UI components”Multi references are not only a schema feature. They matter because later queries can expose the linked records cleanly, and update flows can write those links without you manually micro-managing the junction table. This is the foundation behind practical many-to-many UI patterns such as tag pickers, attendee selectors, and other multi-select editing flows.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”Continue into related workflows depending on what you want to do next: use Tagify-style UI for many-to-many selection, inspect how nested records are queried, or go back to Database Manager recipes for another schema task.