Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Excluded : UI Property in Product Config

Product Configurator in Siebel is a complete world in itself. Recently when I get the requirement to implement a Country/State constraint (i.e. to display the States depending upon the value selected in Country) inside the Product Config, it sounds new thing for me. I thought of using "Constraints" of Product Config for this requirement, but let me tell you what exactly the scenario was.

I have two attributes viz. Country and State exposed on the UI of one Product. These both are enumerated attributes with the following values :

1. Country
Values = India, US

2. State
Values = Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Ohio, New York

Now, the requirement was when user selects "Country = India", he should not able to select "Ohio and New York" in state attribute and similarly when "Country = US", he should not able to select state as "Uttar Pradesh" or "Madhya Pradesh".

So, the requirement sounds very simple of its nature and anyone worked on Product Config can think of using "Constraints" here. I used "Exclude" constraint like this :

a) When the attribute Country = India excludes (the attribute State = Ohio OR the attribute State = New York)

b) When the attribute Country = US excludes (the attribute State = Uttar Pradesh OR the attribute State = Madhya Pradesh)

When I validated the Product and selected "India" in country attribute, the values "Ohio" and "New York" become red. That means system is showing me the values with different color which will violate the constraint that I have built. So I want to see what happen if I still select that value, in that case, system prompts me for the constraint violation and ask me for "Proceed"/"undo".

So, what I want to say here, though I have already used the Product Config's vanilla constraint (i.e. Exclude), system is still showing all the values (but violated values in diff color). But the requirement is just NOT to display the values at all.

To achieve this, you have use a "Product Config UI Property i.e. Excluded".

So I used this property on the root product with the following details :
Name : Excluded
Value : Y

Refreshed the product and validate and everything looks good now. No more values are displaying in State attribute which may violate the constraint.

.

1 comment:

  1. Hai gaurav, it was looking strange tome. that is it is like a constraining picklist . My question is does the product config has diffent user properties.

    ReplyDelete