Confusion about Custom Relationships

Hello!

I feel I’m not understanding how something should work.

I’m trying to set up a custom relationship of perpetrator/victim which could be one of a few groups, e.g. a state actor, an identity group, an armed group etc. Any of these can be perpetrator or victim. So far so good.

However, I only want to see this relationship on Events. I dont need to see this on each of the groups above.

The problem is that under “Show for item types” Aeon pre-populates the check boxes with all of the groups above and I’m not able to uncheck them. And the actual item type I want it on—Events—is not available unless I also choose it as one of the relationship types above.

However, if I do that, then when go to my actual event and try to select a group in my perpetrator/victim relationship field, I see every single event in my database, which adds a lot of clutter to sort through. I don’t want to see my events here, just the groups that can act on each other.

So it seems I’m not understanding how it works. What I expect to happen is that I can choose all my groups as victims/perpetrators, then select only the event item type to show the field on, and then when selecting the perpetrator in my event, I only see the groups I selected.

Really appreciate it!

Here’s my relationship section. I don’t want to select event here, but if not, then I’m not able to choose it in the “show for item types” section.

Hi romebot2,

Thanks for the additional explanation and screenshots. I checked this with the team, and there are two separate things happening here.

Firstly, there is currently a bug with the Show for Item Types settings. These options can’t be edited correctly when initially configuring the relationship. If you save your changes, close the Settings window, and then reopen it, you should be able to adjust the Show for Item Types options. We have queued this to be fixed.

For the Perpetrator/Victim setup itself, because you want to record who or what was the perpetrator of an Event, and who or what was the victim of an Event, these should be configured as two separate relationships, rather than a single Perpetrator/Victim relationship.

For each relationship, Event should be on one side, with the Item Types that can act as perpetrators or victims on the other. In your project, for example, these could include Person, State/Entity, Empire/Dynasty/Reign, Armed Groups/Military, and Group.

The Perpetrator relationship can be configured like this:

And the Victim relationship can be configured in the same way:

This means Events themselves don’t need to appear among the possible perpetrators or victims when you are selecting them.

Once configured this way, you can show the relevant relationship fields on your Events and record the perpetrators and victims there.

Best,
Riaan
Aeon Timeline Support