I am having to convert several relationships to complex relationships (a unique object for each). Unfortunately, the conversion process only creates the new object with a concatenated name of the objects.
I found no reference to this functionality in the User Guide, but I think "convert" would infer that references to the two related objects would appear in their respective Lookup fields associated with the object types.
Instead, the convert process actually eliminates all records of the relationships with the exception of the object names. If the object names are not guaranteed unique (which is often the case), there is not dependable way (even with triggers) to recreate the relationships after conversion.
Documentation would be helpful to avoid a potentially catastrophic loss of data - but making convert actually convert the relationships would seem to be more essential.
I confirm the issue: lookup fields are not created for existing Objects (only on new intermediate object). Tracking defect as PSC00328485
Add-on note: Trigger work-arounds using name field lookups into the original object also requires that the object name not contain a dash.
Another observation: Convert for a non-hierarchical one-to-many relationship is actually creating two records for each existing relationship which is inconsistent with the original definition (A-B and B-A). Since the lookup fields are not populated, there is no duplicate check possible.
Thanks for observation, all aspects of the problem will be addressed.
Just to add to the "aspects of the problem" - see thread community.progress.com/.../16493.aspx.
While Convert is creating a dependent object for the relationships, and making them visible to the current application, it is NOT automatically adding the object to the list of dependent objects for the application. This results in Generate XML errors - requiring manually attaching the dependent objects to the application.