Hi Lawrence, a relationship toward a Set or towards a Folder would be indeed useful but then you start to mix relationships ("link" between your Process items to your Business rules Set) and locations ("link" between your Business rules Set and its contained rules Items).
The relationship minded way to implement your use case is to create a special Item type "Business Rules Group" to be relate from the "Process" Items and have relationships form the "Business Rules Group" Items to "Business Rule" Items. Now, practically those "Business Rule" Items need to be stored somewhere and will be naturally be organized by Folders or Sets according to the business rules groups…
I find this frustrating and dangerous for data consistency because the Folder or Set are duplicating the grouping information of the "Business Rules Group" items! So yes, why not using the Folder or Set instead of the "Business Rules Group" Items by allowing a relationship from Item to Folder or Set (and why even not to a Component)!
Remains to cover the downstream relationship towards "Business Rule" Items that is now just a location property. This concern could be overcome if Jama would treat location information as 1 to N relationships. This should be for all containers: Components, Sets, Folders and also Items. Items are indeed also containers by their indentation property (may contain Items of same type).
In Single Item View, instead of being greyed out, Containers, Sets and Folders Relationship widget would refer to their contained items. Widget at Item level would show the relationships as today + refer to the indented items (if any). This is an extra step in unification between containers (see Trace View of single Item; List View for Indented Items )
------------------------------
Christian Binard
ON semiconductor
Belgium
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 03-31-2020 17:17
From: Lawrence Anvari
Subject: Relate an item to a set
Why not support relating items to sets of items. For example you have a process and it is supported by a set of use cases. Then we only have to manage one relationship, instead of many relationships.
Other examples:
- Relate a process to a set of business rules.
- Relate a use case to a set of business rules.
- Relate a use case to a set of functional requirements.
- Etc.
Thanks
------------------------------
Lawrence Anvari
Business Analyst
Department of Health
Olympia WA
------------------------------