Relationships and linked threads

Relationships describe how Threads relate to each other — “blocks / is blocked by”, “parent of / child of”, “supersedes / is superseded by”. A relationship is defined once for your Team, then used any number of times to link pairs of Threads. Each link is directional: one Thread carries the forward label, the other the inverse.

Relationship definitions

A relationship type has four parts, set on the Relationships page:

• Name — the type’s name (e.g. “Blocking”, “Dependency”, “Hierarchy”).
• Description — optional context for your Team.
• Forward Label — how the link reads from the source Thread (e.g. “blocks”, “depends on”, “parent of”).
• Inverse Label — how it reads from the other side (e.g. “is blocked by”, “is depended on by”, “child of”).

As the form notes: “Relationship labels appear exactly as written in thread history and relationship pickers”, so word them the way you want them read.

Create a relationship type

1. Open Relationships in the navigation.
2. Click New Relationship.
3. Fill in Name, optional Description, Forward Label, and Inverse Label — “Both labels will appear in the dropdown when linking items.”
4. Click Create.

Each relationship type appears as a card showing how many links use it (“N links using this relationship”) with actions to Edit the labels and description, View Links, or Archive it. Archived types keep their existing links but disappear from pickers; toggle Show Archived to see them and Unarchive to bring one back.

Link Threads from a Thread’s page

Linking happens on a Thread’s detail page, in its Relationships section (“Related threads and dependencies”).

1. In the Relationships section, open the Add Relationship dialog — “Choose a relationship type and Thread to link.”
2. Pick the relationship type. You can search the list, or click Create A New Relationship to define one without leaving the dialog.
3. Pick a direction — forward or inverse label — for how the new links should read from this Thread.
4. Select the target Threads (see below). Selected Threads collect in a Pending selection panel; remove any you didn’t mean to add.
5. Click Add Relationships (the button counts the pending links, e.g. Add 3 Relationships).

Changing the relationship type or direction mid-way clears the pending selection (after a “Clear pending selection?” confirmation), since the checks for what’s already linked depend on both.

Selecting targets: Browse or Identify

The target picker has two tabs:

• Browse — a searchable Thread table (with a Show archived toggle). Multi-select the Threads to link.
• Identify — pick the target by scanning its identifier, using the same DUST, Camera, or Manual scanner modes as the main scanner (see Identifiers and scanning). A successful scan adds the matched Thread to the pending selection (“added to pending selection — will be linked when you confirm”).

Scanned Threads are validated before they’re added. The scanner will refuse a Thread that:

• is the Thread you’re linking from (“Cannot link to itself”),
• is not owned by the same Team as the anchor Thread (“Not available for linking”),
• is archived while Show archived is off,
• is already in the pending selection, or already has this relationship and direction (“Already linked”).

Linking on shared Threads

When you’re adding links on a Thread another Team shared with you, the relationship types come from the owning Team (“Choose a relationship type from the owner and link it to another Thread you can edit”) — you can’t create new types for someone else’s Thread. See Sharing and access.

View all links for a relationship

From a relationship card, View Links opens a table of every link using that type, with columns Relationship, Related Thread, and Created. You can search by Thread name and filter by type (All relationships by default). Note the direction caveat shown on the page: “This table shows links grouped by the direction in which they were created.”

Remove a link

In a Thread’s Relationships section, each linked Thread has an Unlink action. Unlinking asks for confirmation — “This action cannot be undone and will be tracked in the Thread history.” Both the creation and removal of links appear in transaction history as “Linked Thread” and “Unlinked Thread” events.

Relationships vs. assembly positions

Relationships and assemblies both connect Threads, but they do different jobs:

	Relationship link	Assembly part
Meaning	Descriptive: any labeled association between two peer Threads	Structural: a part is installed into a parent assembly
Direction	Forward/inverse labels you define	Always part-of-assembly, optionally at a named position
Access	No effect — each Thread keeps its own access	Parts inherit the assembly’s access
Ownership	Both Threads must be owned by the same Team	Parts must share the assembly’s owner

Use a relationship for “these two things are related in this way”; use an assembly when one Thread is physically or logically built into another.

Related pages

AssembliesStructural part-of composition between Threads.

Identifiers and scanningThe scanner used by the Identify picker.

ActivityWhere link and unlink events are recorded.