A lookup relationship field is a custom field that you can use to establish relationships between tickets, users, organizations, andcustom objects. Additionally, lookup relationship fields can be used to define relationships for custom objects with articles in Zendesk Knowledge and brands.

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Summary: ◀▼

Lookup relationship fields let you link tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects to define relationships and filter options by tags or custom fields. You can create up to 10 fields per object depending on your plan. Filters help narrow choices based on roles, statuses, or matching field values, improving data relevance and organization for support workflows.

A lookup relationship field is a custom field that you can use to establish relationships between tickets, users, organizations, and custom objects. Additionally, lookup relationship fields can be used to define relationships for custom objects with articles in Zendesk Knowledge and brands.

This article contains the following topics:
  • Adding lookup relationship fields
  • Filtering the field's options
Related articles:
  • Understanding lookup relationship fields
  • Retrieving lookup relationship data with the API
  • Defining parent-child relationships for custom objects

Adding lookup relationship fields

As with other custom fields, lookup relationship fields are displayed on their object's pages in the Zendesk interface. The number of lookup fields you can create per object depends on your plan:
  • Suite Team and Suite Growth plans can have a maximum of 5 lookup relationship fields per object.
  • Suite Professional plans and above can have a maximum of 10 lookup relationship fields per object.
    Note: For tickets, these limits apply to the number of lookup fields per ticket form, up to a total of 40 lookup fields for all ticket forms.

To create a lookup relationship field

  1. Start by adding a custom field to your users, organizations, tickets, or custom object and select Lookup relationship as the custom field type. For more information, see:
    • Adding custom fields to your tickets and ticket forms
    • Adding custom fields to users
    • Adding custom fields to organizations
    • Defining a custom object's schema with custom fields

    Example:

  2. Set the Display name, Field key, and Description as described in the articles linked from step 1.
  3. Select a related object to list in the lookup relationship field.

    The related object can be a ticket, user, organization, or the name of another custom object. For custom objects, the related object can also be articles or brands. For example, if you select User as the related object, the lookup relationship field will display a list of Zendesk users.

  4. (Optional) Click Add filter to define one or more filters to reduce the number of options that the field can display.
    You can filter objects by any number of tags or custom fields. For more information, see Filtering the field's options.
    Note: Filters aren't supported for custom object lookup relationship fields with articles as the related object.
  5. Click Save.

Filtering the field's options

Your account could have thousands or even millions of ticket, user, organization, and custom object records. In most cases, you'll want a defined subset of records for the options in your lookup relationship fields. For example, you might want to list only users who are account managers.

All lookup relationship fields that target standard objects can filter the records of the related object by tag. For example, to list only users who are account managers, you could add an "account_manager" tag to the user profiles of your account managers and then define the following filter condition for the lookup relationship field: Tags | Contain at least one of the following | account_manager. This isn't possible for lookup fields that target custom objects.

Depending on the object the lookup field is defined on and the object it targets, different filters are available to help admins restrict the records available to be selected within the field.
  • Lookup fields that target tickets have the following additional default filters are available: Status, Type, Priority, Assignee, Requester, Form, Organization, and Channel.
  • Lookup fields that target users have an additional Role filter available.
  • Ticket lookup relationship fields that target other custom objects can dynamically restrict the object records available for selection within the lookup field by using additional filters based on the ticket's current user, assignee, requester, and organization.

Lookup relationship fields also support filtering by other custom fields added to the related object. For example, if you add a Security Clearance custom checkbox field to the user profile, the Security Clearance field will appear as a filter option when you add the lookup relationship field. You could then define the following filter condition for the field: Security Clearance | Is | Checked.

Furthermore, you can filter lookup relationship fields based on whether they match or don't match field values in the source object. For example, if a ticket has a lookup relationship field named Product category that points to a custom object named Product, you could filter the results to return only Product records that have a Category field value that matches the ticket's Product category field. When filtering lookup relationship fields for matching values in one of the source object's fields, the tags (rather than values) are compared for drop-down fields.

When using the match and does not match operators to filter lookup field values, you can only compare values in fields of the same type. For example, two drop-down field values can be compared, but you can't compare a drop-down field's value to a multi-select field's value. Therefore these operators are only available when matching field types exist. Additionally, the lookup fields must have the same target object. For example, you can filter which custom object records are available for selection in a ticket lookup relationship field targeting a custom object by matching the ticket's brand with the custom object record's brand because in both cases, the target object is brands.

When using lookup relationship fields to connect to an object with a currency field, you can filter based on the record's currency value being equal to, greater than, or less than a specified currency and value.

You can modify the filters at any time. This won't affect the values previously selected within lookup relationship fields.

To learn more, see About custom fields and Building trigger condition statements.

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