Messaging Relationships Overview

Messaging relationships define the source and target of published information for a specific message type. Relationships consist of a publication, which provides the source of the data, and a subscription, which provides the target for that data.

To activate your relationship, both the publication and subscription must be enabled. You can enable or disable publications from the Foundations Setup tab. See Enabling and Disabling Publications and Subscriptions for more information. From Winter 2022, the messaging relationship indicates when its publication or subscription is disabled.

You can also enable, disable, and customize publications and subscriptions by editing the records directly. You can access these records from the Publications and Subscriptions links when viewing a message type.

Customizing Relationships

Most publications and subscriptions can be customized by adding or editing mappings. However, some FinancialForce integrations are intended to work only in the way they are provided and cannot be customized.

Subscription Types

When creating a custom messaging relationship, two subscription type options are available:

  • Standard
  • Multiple Identifier References on Target

Standard

This option enables you to specify a single field that is used to identify a target record. Standard is the default subscription type for custom messaging relationships.

To see an example of this subscription type in use, see Example Messaging Relationship Setup.

Multiple Identifier References on Target

This option enables you to create subscriptions that use many fields to identify a target parent record.

It's useful when you want to create parent and child records from a single source record. For example, if you import data from a spreadsheet to a single object and want to create parent and child records based on that data.

All mappings at the parent level are used to identify the parent target record. If an existing target record contains data that matches the parent mappings, a new child record is added to it automatically. If no existing target record contains data that matches the parent mappings, a new parent-level record is created.

For master-detail relationships, child records in the message are added to existing parent records automatically, up to a configurable maximum. You can define the maximum number of child records on a parent when creating the relationship using the new Maximum Child Records on Target field. When using this option, you must specify the field on the target that stores the number of child records that belong to a parent. We recommend that you do this by creating a roll-up summary field on the target object.

To see an example of this subscription type in use, see Example Messaging Relationship Setup: Creating Parent and Child Records from a Flat Source.