The Xref Pattern for Two-Way References

Developers who are familiar with relational database models see the Ref and Multi-Ref fields and immediately assume they are seeing a relational database.

With this perspective comes some assumptions;

• I should be able to query this somehow
• I should be able to travel across multiple references, to tables further away in the relationship map
• Relationships should be two-way

Unfortunately the Webflow CMS is actually based on a key-value document database ( MongoDB ), rather than a relational database, so none of these things are possible.

The Xref Pattern

What you can do, depending on your use case, is to create a third collection using an cross-reference ( xref ) pattern.

Let's say you're building a movie site, and you need to describe Actors and Movies. An actor is probably in many movies, and in fact the role they play in each movie has important details too.

So we structure it this way;

• Actors collection contains details about your actors
• ‍Movies collection contains details about your movies
• Role collection contains a single-ref to Movies, a single-ref to Actors, and other role-specific fields like role name, character name, awards…

Application

This approach solves a number of problems in Webflow page design.

On your Movies collection page, you can include a collection list bound to Role, which is filtered to Current Movie. This allows you to easily show all of the actors that are in that movie.

On your Actors collection page, you can also include a collection list bound to Role, which is filtered to Current Actor. That way, you can easily show all of the movies that this actor was in.

You now have your two-way reference.

Notes

https://discourse.webflow.com/t/reverse-multi-reference-fields/48975/7

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