Dynamically create a many-to-many relationship through an existing parent relationship

Feature request: Dynamically create a many-to-many relationship through an existing parent relationship

I would like the ability to create a many-to-many relationship within an automation by dynamically following an existing one-to-many parent relationship.

Currently, the relationship action requires us to select one fixed target record. Every record passing through the automation is therefore related to the same predetermined record.

Instead, I would like the automation to use the parent record already associated with each individual record.

For example, a system I am building involves multiple objects (students, parents, enrolments, exams and classes). Each object record has a one-to-many rlationships with other the object records. An Enrolment may already have an Exam Session assigned through a one-to-many relationship. When that Enrolment passes through an automation, I would like the automation to follow its existing Exam Session relationship and create a new many-to-many relationship between that Enrolment and the same Exam Session (eg. Invited, opted out, paid).

The action within an automation could therefore be configured as:

• Action: Add a many-to-many relationship

• Relationship: Enrolment Paid for Exam Session

• Target record: The parent record held in the Enrolment’s existing Exam Session relationship

Through a single automation, the target would be determined separately for each Enrolment, rather than being a fixed Exam Session for every record that was selected when the automation was built.

It is currently possible to achieve this through a workaround, but it requires additional temporary fields on the parent record and a webhook to retrieve and create the required relationship. This can be handled externally through an intermediary service such as Make or Zapier, or through Ontraport’s native webhook functionality.

Both approaches introduce avoidable complexity. They require extra fields to be created and maintained, additional automation steps, more opportunities for errors and, in some cases, reliance on a separate platform.

Because the correct parent record is already identified through the existing one-to-many relationship, it would be far more efficient for the native relationship action to use that record directly. This would make many-to-many relationship actions significantly more flexible, reduce technical workarounds and allow users to build cleaner, more reliable automations entirely within Ontraport.