Mapping entity relationships

In order to automatically process privacy requests with Fides, the relationships between databases and tables must be mapped so that it can traverse them correctly during a privacy request.

You can see a simple example of this entity relationship mapped between the Purchase_items, Purchase and Users table below.

Define relationships between datasets, collections and fields

You can specify the relationship across datasets, collections and fields so that you can model relationships between databases, tables or APIs.

To map relationships the dataset fields that will need to be configured are:

Key	Value
`fides_meta`	Fides metadata attributes, used for defining entity relationships between collections and tables for privacy requests.
`dataset`	Reference to the dataset where the related collection and field are located.
`field`	Reference to the collection and field in the format `collection.field`.
`direction`	The direction of the mapped relationship for the purpose of privacy requests processing.
`data_type`	Specify a required data type for type checking.
`length`	Where a data type may require length, set the string length.

Expanding on our sample project, to specify that the address_id field of the customer table has a relationship to the id field of the address table, the dataset is set to postgres_example_test_dataset, the field is set to address.to and the direction is to.

postgres_dataset.yml

collections:
  - name: customer
    fields:
    - name: address_id
      data_categories:
      - system.operations
      fides_meta:                                   # Add Fides metadata section
        references:                                 # Specify references for relationship mapping
        - dataset: postgres_example_test_dataset    # Add reference to related dataset
          field: address.id                         # Add to field in the format collection.field
          direction: to                             # Specify the direction of the request processing
    - name: created
      data_categories:
      - system.operations

Direction specifies the order of execution for privacy requests. Specifying to in the example above means that the value from customer.address_id should be used to retrieve the appropriate record from address.id.

Defining identity keys Skipping collections