I thought every Relation automatically had a "reverse relation"

Any Discussion
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I thought every Relation automatically had a “reverse relation” but it seems not.

For example, I have a topic called Advanced Macroeconomics, which is written by David Romer, so I thought there would be a “reverse relationship” under David Romer, he wrote a book called Advanced Macroeconomics.

Maybe the program can’t automatically determine the logical relationship between “author” and “wrote”, so it can’t name it automatically.

I think it could prompt me to name the relationship.

However, it doesn’t.

This is a bit disappointing to me.

It would be too tedious for me to have to handle each “relation” twice manually.

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To get something like this done, there has to be an object for the book and and object for the author. In the books object you then use a relation like “author” and choose the authors object. This way the two objects would be connected.

Do you want having the objects and relations created for you, just by typing “David wrote a book called Advanced Macroeconomics”?

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In my experience with Notion, if I create a book Advanced Macroeconomics for David in one of its databases called Person, it will have an option of “show it in the Book database or not”.(① in the figure)

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I can define the relation name Author(②) and Wrote(③), it will be shown in the mini map with the same word I used(④ and ⑤)

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Do you mean you expect the backlink to show?

This would “solve” the issue you mentioned, as you’d have the relationship mentioned in the other object without need to explicitly write the name of the mirror relation. In your example, the author page would have a section called “relations that link here” and it would show the book having that person as author.

Perhaps one interesting feature request would be ability to rename a mirror relation. So in Homer’s page Lisa shows as daughter, but in Lisa’s page Homer shows as father. (in your example, it’s simpler - could be author in both cases…).

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Yes, it is the same feature I mean. But unfortunately, it is also just a “request”, too. :rofl:

Yes, that will be great.

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Hello everyone :nerd_face: This issue one of our top priority stuff, but it is blocked by architecture refactoring we are doing in the moment. Hopefully you will see an mvp of this feature in several releases

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any movement on this? I saw the latest reply was from 1 year ago, and it mentioned an MVP of this feature would be coming but I don’t seem to see it in the current version of the app. Was this ever rolled out?

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We started working on first iteration of this feature recently. We are starting with backlinks relation with all the objects referencing current one. And afterward we would provide full reverse relations capabilities but for now it is not a high priority.

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phenomenal! For me, the above is really all i need. I’m not even sure what you mean when you mention “full reverse relations capabilities” but the more pared down version of just “backlinks referencing the current one” is a very helpful addition to the product.

thanks much

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I think it means that we’d be able to create relations that show up on both objects that are connected. For example, if I have a Human object and an Organization object, I could have a “member” relations. This would show on each Human object, all of the Organization objects that the Human is a part of; and on each Organization object, all of the Humans that are part of that Organization. And when we edit the relation, it would automatically edit it on both objects.

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thanks for that clarification. I would LOVE that and basically it would solve a lot of problems I have when it comes to PKM.

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