This is a discussion of some related new features we could add to Informl.

One motivation is to be able to include in a page multiple "entries" relating to another (sub)table. For example, from a Contact page we want to be able to include as many address or phone entries as desired -- eg "home phone", "work phone", "UK mobile", "US mobile", etc -- with the labels in some cases provided by the user, dynamically.

In other cases we will want the relationship(s) to be named by the page creator -- such as parent/child.

One approach for implementing this would be to have the two primary tables -- one for contacts and one for phone numbers -- and a join table that relates the two, and names the association between them. We have considered a single master join table with three (or four) columns -- two global IDs, and a label for the relationship between them (and possibly a second label for the inverse relationship -- ie, parent and child, or manager and report(s)).

A related problem we don't yet have a solution to is the need to be able to refer more than once to the same foreign page -- ie a person table that refers to father and mother.