Representing parent-child relationships in SharePoint lists

Question

I need to create some functionality in our SharePoint app that populates a list or lists with some simple hierarchical data. Each parent record will represent a "submission" and each child record will be a "submission item." There's a 1-to-n relationship between submissions and submission items. Is this practical to do in SharePoint? The only types of list relationships I've done so far are lookup columns, but this seems a bit different. Also, once such a list relationship is established, then what's the best way to create views on this kind of data. I'm almost convinced that it'd be easier just to write this stuff to an external database, but I'd like to give SharePoint a shot in order to take advantage of the automated search capabilities.

Answer 1

Proper Parent/Child in Sharepoint is near impossible without developing it yourself. There is one approach to that here: Simulate Parent / Child relationship in SharePoint 2007 with Folders & Content Types

(Note: This concerns SharePoint 2007. In 2010, Joins make this much easier)