Related records
Fix an account’s industry from a list of its contacts, a contact’s title from the account page, or review every account’s contacts and open deals in one list — without opening record after record or scrolling related lists one at a time.
Why it matters
Quarterly reviews, order checks and data clean-ups mostly mean opening a record, scrolling its related lists, fixing one thing, and doing it again. Child tables put the related records inside the list: open a row, fix the related record in its own grid, close it, move on. A related field does the same in the other direction: the account’s industry or the owner’s email beside each row, without a formula field per column, and fixed where you notice it.
Where it stops
This is the part of the product where the paid grids are ahead, and we would rather say so here than have you find out later. Rowhouse follows real lookups and master-detail relationships: fields of the records a row points to, up to five lookups away, and child tables for the records that point to it. It does not join objects that have no relationship, and a polymorphic lookup such as a task’s Related To cannot be reached through.
See it as your users will
An editable related list
On an account’s page, a grid of its contacts: edit in place, with display rules and a formula column of its own, and nothing but this account’s records.
How a record page grid finds its records
The page hands its record to the grid, and the grid shows the related records whose lookup points to it — set once, on the grid’s configuration.
Child tables, configured
Each child table is a grid of its own, linked to its parent by a lookup such as AccountId. Contacts and Opportunities open as tabs under each account.
In detail
Fields of a related record, as columns
A column can show a field of a record the row points to, named as a report or a formula names it: Account.Industry on a contact grid, or Account.Owner.Email, up to five lookups away. On the Grid Admin tab, choose the lookup (Account >) in the column’s Field list, then the field. It is headed as a report heads it, Account: Industry, and it sorts, searches, filters, groups, subtotals and takes display rules like any column.
Edited on the related record
Change an account’s industry on one contact’s row and every loaded row with the same account shows it at once, as one undo step; Save writes the account once, through your own access to it and to the field. A row with no account shows a lock, and two rows that give the same account different values are both refused, with the reason in each cell.
An editable related list on any record page
Place a grid on a record page and it shows only the records related to that page’s record, with every grid capability: spreadsheet keys, grouping, display rules, import and actions. An import there links every new record to the page’s record automatically.
Child tables under each row
A row opens a panel of tabs, one per related object, each a full grid with its own search, columns, sort, editing, display rules, import and Save bar — limited to that row’s related records. A child table can have child tables of its own, three levels in all.
Child total columns
A figure on each parent row worked out from its related records — a count, or the sum, average, lowest or highest of a field — so an account with no open deals stands out without a roll-up summary field.
Where it stops
Each limit is there for a reason you can see: how much a browser draws smoothly, or how much Salesforce lets one transaction do. Every limit, and the benchmark →
- A related record's fieldup to 5 lookups away, each to one kind of record
- Child table levels3
- Child total columns per grid5
- One object per grid. A grid shows its own object’s records, with fields of the records they point to, and reaches the records that point to them through child tables. It does not join objects with no lookup between them; AGrid and RavenApps Grids reach further across objects than Rowhouse does.
- Not through every lookup. A lookup that can point to more than one kind of record, such as a task’s Related To or an owner that can be a queue, cannot be reached through. New rows cannot set a related record’s field, and an import leaves such columns out.
- Child tables keep no layout of their own per user.
Against the paid grids
Related records: questions
How deep can child tables go?
Three levels: a grid, its child tables, and theirs. Each level is its own grid, built on the Grid Admin tab.
Can a record page show only that record’s related records?
Yes. Set the grid’s record page lookup, place it on that object’s record page, and it shows only the related records, like a related list you can edit in place.
Can a grid show and edit fields from the parent record?
Yes. A column can name a field through lookups, such as Account.Industry on a contact grid, up to five lookups away, and an edit there is saved to the related record. You need read access to every lookup on the way and edit access to that record and field.
Can I show fields from unrelated objects in one grid?
No. A Rowhouse grid shows one object, with fields of the records it points to, and reaches the records that point to it through child tables. If you need one grid across objects with no relationship, AGrid and RavenApps Grids do that.
Three things you can verify without asking us
Free. Not freemium, not a trial, not a tier.
Install it, assign the permission sets, build your first grid on the Grid Admin tab. Everything else is in the Grid Guide inside the app.