Associations, Part 2

Part 1 of the Associations tutorials provides a birds-eye overview of the concept of associations while, at the same time, focusing on NotesMappr’s particular implementation of associations.

Part 2 of the tutorial provides you with a more practical overview of associations focusing on the respective members of an association and, specifically, their accompanying roles.

Let’s just quickly review associations again… we know that an association is about establishing a relationship between two notes. Furthermore, an association consists of an association type and is made up of two members – one for each note. Let’s take a look at this, diagrammatically:

Associations – Type, members and accompanying roles

So, as you can see in the above diagram, we have an association of type Project, that has two members, John and Project X, respectively. John’s role within this association is one of Student while Project X plays the role of University (as in, this is a university-related project).

Now, let’s take a look at the following diagram exemplifying how the association’s elements correspond to the actual user interface of NotesMappr’s ‘Create Association’ screen:

Association to user interface mapping

First thing to remember is that NotesMappr infers the source note when creating an association making it unnecessary to actually have to define the source note. That is, when creating an association, NotesMappr defines the current note to be the source note in the association. In this example, John is the current note (as indicated at the top of the screen), hence we do not have to ‘choose’ or otherwise indicate that John is the source note in this association.

What does need to be defined is John‘s role in the association; in this case, John plays the role of Student. Furthermore, it is obviously necessary to define the actual ‘destination’ note, that is, John’s counterpart in the association – who (or what) is John being linked to. In this case that is Project X, a project that John is undertaking as part of his university studies. Finally, we also need to indicate what role the Project X note plays in this association (University).

Obviously, the roles that the individual members play within an association are quite arbitrary. That is, the roles of Student and University are just examples and you could argue that the above association could be defined differently, i.e., with different roles. What’s more, the roles in the associations that you create in NotesMappr need to be defined by you as it is obviously impossible to predefine all of the possible roles that the members can play within a given association. This is an extremely important point and crucial with regards to being able to use NotesMappr effectively: the roles (that the individual members play) within an association are user defined (that is, by you) and are notes in themselves – association roles are defined in terms of other notes. That is, in the above example, both the roles Student and University are notes that have been previously created.

The three fields in the ‘Create Association’ screen (i.e., the destination note, the source role and the destination role fields) provide you with an auto-complete drop-down menu of all of the defined notes within the app making it very easy to define your associations. Take a look at the screen shot below:

Association creation with auto-complete functionality

Finally, it is important to note that NotesMappr provides a shortcut of sorts when defining an association. That is, you can basically define an association by only providing the destination note and omitting both the source and destination role (and leaving the default association type of Association). In that case, NotesMappr will infer ‘Related‘ for both roles. So, an association defined in this manner (by only providing the destination note) will have the following properties:

• Type: Association
• Source role: Related
• Destination role: Related

The above-mentioned shortcut allows you to very quickly create a generic association between two notes at the expense of losing some of the semantic richness that associations provide you with.

If you still have any questions with regards to NotesMappr’s associations, leave a comment below and I will try to answer them.