Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Enterprise |
| Access | Admin |
Objects can relate to each other, and a roll-up field summarises the children on the parent. Powerful, and easy to overbuild.
Parent and child
One object can point at another. A subscription belongs to a contract; a device belongs to a location. That is a parent-child relationship, built with a lookup field on the child.
A parent can have any number of children. What is limited is the lookup fields themselves: five per object on Suite Team and Growth, ten on Professional and above. And where a child points at two parents, only one of those parents' permissions is inherited, so a record can end up more visible than the second parent intended.
Roll-up summary fields
A field on the parent that summarises its children: how many there are, the sum of a value, the earliest date. Calculated for you and kept current.
So a contract can show how many subscriptions it covers without anyone maintaining that number.
Two limits shape where you can use them. The parent has to be a custom object, so there is no rolling up onto a ticket, a user or an organisation. And a roll-up summarises at most 10,000 child records: past that it is not a slower number, it is no number, because the field cannot be calculated at all.
Where this genuinely helps
- A count that agents need at a glance, such as devices on a site.
- A total that would otherwise be worked out by hand.
- The next date coming up across a set of children.
Where it goes too far
Three levels of objects with roll-ups at each level is a data model, and Zendesk is a support tool. Once you are designing schemas, ask whether this data belongs in the system that owns your business data, with Zendesk holding a reference.
The honest test: could a new admin understand your object structure in ten minutes? If not, it will be maintained badly.
Reporting does not follow the chain
Explore reaches related records through the ticket, and does so more for one hop than two. Design assuming one hop, and copy anything you need to report on onto the ticket.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.