I'm exploring Civicrm for a client that processes emergency grants for individuals with medical, and other issues. There is a process to fill out forms which often requires follow-up in the workflow.
For the architecture, I plan to use grants (and the grant application extension) to collect and approve grant applications (since this is designed with financial accounting in mind) but also create a case and activities to manage the application process (followup, approval, etc.).
There is a close entity relationship between the grant application and the Case. Since civicrm does not (yet) have entity relationship or lookup custom fields, does anyone have a suggestion of how to approach this relatively simple requirement? Basically, Grants and Cases would each have a reciprocal field to connect each other.
I'm sure the "answer" will require creating an extension (would prefer to avoid maintaining it). I could also do this in Drupal with entities / views / rules but wondering if there are any other clever approaches.