Custom associations
You can associate content within the Alfresco repository with one or more content items. An association enables the content to be related to other content.
Alfresco supports two types of associations. The first type is reference association, where
you refer to other content items within a content item. For example, you can associate a legal agreement document with a master contract document. Therefore, you can refer to the associated master contract document whenever you review the legal agreement document. With reference association, if you delete one of the documents, then the other document will not be deleted.
The second type of association is called child association, where content (such as space) contains other content items. The child association is employed when we do not want the child source to exist when the source goes away. It is similar to the concept of a cascaded delete in a relational database, or of deleting a folder in Microsoft Windows Explorer...
