Learn about consolidating relationship crosswalk to prevent excessive entries.

Do you have an excessive number of crosswalk entries in your relationships or are you looking to prevent that? Use this consolidation mechanism to ensure cleaner, more efficient relationship management by detecting and consolidating redundant crosswalks. It uses a tenant level flag and a relationship level flag to consolidate crosswalks. These flags control whether crosswalks from the same contributor are overwritten with the latest entry or retained separately. The mechanism is especially useful for relationships like "HasAddress," where minor variations in data can create unnecessary duplicates.

Here's how it works. The system detects and consolidates crosswalks when they share:

• The same relationship type

• The same start and end objects contributor.

• The same source type.

For example, the HasAddress relationship has crosswalks from the same contributor with similar start and end objects. There are slight variations in the address - say one has "123 Main Street" and the other has "123 Main St". In such cases, when crosswalks are consolidated, the most recent entry is retained.

Consolidating crosswalks also depends on the the level at which the flag is set - tenant level or relationship level. Refer to the below table for more details.

{
...
...
...
 "enableNestedPartialOverride": true,  
  "enableReferencePartialOverride": true, "contributorCrosswalkSingleSourceUpdateMode" : true,
...
...
}

"relationTypes": [
        {
            "uri": "configuration/relationTypes/HasAddress",
            "contributorCrosswalkSingleSourceUpdateMode" : false,
            "attributes": [
                {
....
...
}
]
}

• If a new relationship has the same source and same start/end crosswalks as an existing one, the existing relation is fully overwritten. This applies regardless of updateDate.

• If the new crosswalk has a different source type, a new relationship is created instead of overwriting.

• If only one matching incoming relation exists, it updates the existing one directly.

• If multiple new relations come in, the first encountered one overrides others. All subsequent incoming relations are treated as updates and overwrite earlier ones, again ignoring updateDate.

• If a relation has multiple crosswalks from the same source, the system:

  • Uses updateDate to decide which one survives.

  • If there's a tie, it sorts by type, sourceTable, and value, and keeps the first alphabetically.

Let's take an example. Entities E1 and E2 each have crosswalks from source systems Source1 and Source2. Relationship R1 connects E1 and E2 using Source1. If a new relationship R2 comes in with the same contributors, it will override R1. If multiple relation crosswalks are present in the same object, the system evaluates updateDate. If equal, the first one alphabetically (by type, sourceTable, value) survives.

Once you change the configuration with the flags, then run the Relations Start End Objects Consistency Check Task with parameter consolidateRelationCrosswalk.