We often use the structure main (strong) entity - (weak) details, for example, orders - order lines.
In many cases users want to be able to see an overview of lines from all orders, instead of lines per orders. It is a lot of work if they have to export the lines per order. So then I add the order lines as menu item, but I think it adds clutter.
If users have full rights to both the main table and detail table, can they access the detail table without being filtered on the strong entity?
What would be your recommendation to make them access the weak entity?
Best answer by Arie V
@Robin Liu You could in fact consider to add a Task to the Order line table that starts a Process flow action ‘Open document’ which could open the Order line subject as (modal) Document displaying all Order lines. Then you could set the Export button visible on the Action bar to make it easier to Export all Order lines for all Orders the user is able to see.
Note that we don’t have Import/Export process actions yet, so you cannot trigger the Export itself for the user. We do expect to add those process actions to the Platform somewhere in 2026.
“If users have full rights to both the main table and detail table, can they access the detail table without being filtered on the strong entity?”
If users have full rights to both tables, they would be able to access the detail table directly — for example, if it’s added to the menu.
“What would be your recommendation to make them access the weak entity?”
If I’m understanding correctly, you’re looking for an overview of all lines across orders — essentially a list of all lines records that are linked to an order.
In that case, I’d recommend creating a dedicated view of the detail table and configuring the template to only display lines that are linked to an order.
“If users have full rights to both tables, they would be able to access the detail table directly — for example, if it’s added to the menu.”
I mentioned in my post that I am looking for an alternative to adding the weak entity to the menu, because when you do this for mutliple tables, the menu becomes cluttered.
I was just curious if there is a way to access the weak entity not from the menu.
For example, I have thought about adding a task “open weak entity overview” to the strong entity which performs the process action open document.
I was also wondering if to the export function, besides “export selected rows” and “export all rows in grid” an option to “export all rows in table” could be added, or an advanced filter option prior to exporting which shows the strong entity FK filled in by default but can be removed. But I understand that that would pose difficulties with ensuring users do not access rows they are not allowed to based on weak entity and strong entity prefilter rules for example
Thanks for the answer. If there are no other ideas with currently possible options, this is enough for me.
@Robin Liu You could in fact consider to add a Task to the Order line table that starts a Process flow action ‘Open document’ which could open the Order line subject as (modal) Document displaying all Order lines. Then you could set the Export button visible on the Action bar to make it easier to Export all Order lines for all Orders the user is able to see.
Note that we don’t have Import/Export process actions yet, so you cannot trigger the Export itself for the user. We do expect to add those process actions to the Platform somewhere in 2026.
I mainly asked this to see if there were any ideas that I hadn’t thought of yet. I went with adding a task to a table to open an overview of the weak entitiy, and I liked Arie’s tip of making the export button visible on the action bar instead of in the overflow and I made it a primary action.
I could even create dynamic code to easily enable this per table, since I use the same design everywhere, but that’s something to think about in the future.
