I admit that, for a long time, I was under what turned out to be an illusion, that setting Searchable to No had the same effect whether you do it on a lookup or relationship. How wrong was I. (On unrelated note, isn’t “wrong” a binary construct? Wouldn’t that translate to “how zero was my understanding”?)

Let’s say we have ubiquitous employer (account) < employee (contact) 1:N relationship.

Hiding a lookup from Advanced Find stops the field from appearing in the condition for the entity on the N side of the relationship, i.e. contact. Users will not be able to build a condition like “find all contacts employed by Contoso” or “find all unemployed contacts without an employer”.

Hiding a relationship, on the other hand, hides the related entity, which has an impact on both entities:

• on 1 side of the relationship it’s no longer possible to build conditions like “find companies without any employees”, or “find companies that have employees born before 1949”
• on many side of the relationship it’s no longer possible to build conditions on the parent entity, e.g. “find contacts where employer’s turnover is greater than $1,000,000”

Now my (and, by proxy, your) understanding is an extremely solid 1.

(Facebook and Twitter cover photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash)