Association classes allow you to make an association between two classes. This association allows you to create a one to many or many to many relationship between objects in the two associated classes. This is useful when you have an object, for example an issue, and you need to associate multiple objects to the issue object, for example assigning multiple employees to the selected issue. Using an association class for this benefit requires multiple configuration steps. First, you must create the association class. Second, create a filter for the association class, displaying the necessary attributes. Lastly, you must place the filter on the appropriate class view. This view will exist in one of the classes that belongs to the association classes. As an example, an Issues view could be created with a filter that displays all of the Employees associated with the issue object by using an Association class.
When the association involves external classes, it is recommended to set up a process that checks the integrity of the associations and makes sure that orphaned associations are removed when external objects are missing. This could be achieved by setting up a Workflow Timer that retrieves all association class objects and checks if the object still exist. If they are missing, the workflow should remove the association object. For more information on setting up Workflow, see Workflow documentation.